Particles falling over rigid object

[John Cuevas]

This can be accomplished using Particle Playground. Be warned though, PP is one of the toughest effects to master in AE. Generally I think most people spend the 200 bucks and buy Trapcodes Particular.

Particle Playground Help with links to tutorials

Made a very simple example project bouncing some particles off a floor: 4368_particleplayground.aep.zip

Good luck,

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[João Cunha]

Is there any way to control the bounce amount?

Thank you for the help and for the sample project.

[John Cuevas]

I played with PP some more and discovered a method for controlling the bounce. I created a precomp(“Layer Map”)placed a gradient on a solid to act as layer map and brought that into the final comp.

Under the Persistent Property Mapper -> Use Layer as Map “Layer Map”.
Map Red to “Kinetic Friction”
Max .5

Doing this slows down the velocity of the particles each time they get into the layer map area. If you lower the “Max” value the particles bounce more, raise it and they bounce less.

I updated the last project. 4380_4368particleplayground2.aep.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[João Cunha]

I don’t know how to thank you for the help you’re giving me.

Now if I raise the cannon that shoots the particles, the bounce goes crazy again.
I’ve checked the solid you made with the ramp. Shouldn’t I just need to raise the gray area and proportionally raise the cannon and the effect would be the same?

Thank you again.

[John Cuevas]

My first thought was to raise the ramp too, but the ramp works as a break on velocity. So if we raise the ramp, it just tells the particles to slow down sooner.

What you want to do is increase the Kinetic friction and decrease the gravity force. That seems to create the most natural bounce. Increasing the friction you will produce less bounce, try increasing in increments of 0.2, it doesn’t take much. This method works best for a continuous particle stream. Lastly, using the same map, I mapped blue to “Lifespan” and set the min to 20 and the max to 30. If you turn off life span the particles accumulate, but they keep sinking below the floor. They only way to stop the sinking was to turn off gravity, but we can’t do that as we need it to pull down the particles. This is the approach I took in Final Version A.

In Version B, I turned off the particles after a couple of seconds and keyframed the friction from 1.5 to 3. This way works pretty good with a limited number of particles and if you want the particle to quit bouncing a lot faster. Finally I keyframed gravity at 15 seconds so you could see the sinking issue.

4384_particleplaygroundv3.aep.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.