Shatter AE

[David Bogie]

I did not mean to suggest AE’s Shatter is your solution. I was trying to find out if you knoew how to use Boris’s Shatter, I do not. There are no ground planes in Shatter, only a few particle systems can be modified by, say, an alpha layer. I do not know if Boris can do it, Shatter cannot. Not in a single comp. You will build your rubble pile (which can be done in SHatter, sort of, by ramping up the Viscosity of the world’s air which will make the pieces come to a halt) and figure out a way to make a transition that adds the rubble.

Blowing up a building is fairly simple using Shatter and you can composite explosion and smoke movies inside and behind the Shatter layer to make it look fabulously realistic. The pieces can be blown away from the building and with excellent ballistics and they will fall with believable mass and gravity. But they will not interact with another layer or an alpha channel like Foam, CC Snow, or some of the Delerium filters.

bogiesan

[Michael Szalapski]

Does it all have to be in the same shot? In every Hollywood explosion these days it’s shot from several angles. Surely you could have a couple angles of the explosion itself (using shatter composited with all the stuff David mentioned) finally settling on a smoking shot of the aftermath. The final shot wouldn’t require shatter at all, just the placement of layers in Photoshop or, if you must, After Effects.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

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