[Mike Clasby]

And Bill O’Niell has a nice little smoke aep you can download in this Shadows tut:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/oneil_bill/shadows2/index.html

[Mike Clasby]

The 2 five minute video by Rick Gerard are great place to start, Expressing the camera covers that smooth anticipatory banking like a jet fighter you want (if I remember correctly).

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/script_gen/authorsort/gerard_rick_script.html

Or

Tutorials: Sort By Author: Rick Gerard

[Mike Clasby]

Thaat looks like Pete’s Smear to me, although to get the pic you showed you’d need to mask off the square pipes (foreground) in a dup layer or have them with alpha.

Pete’s Plugins (freebies)

https://www.petewarden.com/index.htm

His Kaleidascope is worth the downlaod alone, more powerful than the CC version.

Oy, yes in AE Transition > CC Scale wipe is very similar, although Smear above has a few more options.

[Mike Clasby]

Have you tried this?

Duplicate the layer. On the layer below Render > Fill, the Distort > Corner Pin
and move the corners until the shadow falls the way you want.

You can do the same with Perspective > Drop Shadow(or Radial Shadow) and the
Shadow Only checked, then do Corner Pin again, and with these you can soften the shadow (Softness).
It takes some tweaking, but works pretty well. As a related effect you can use the first, but without fill to cast reflections, as in a pool of water, just pull a duplicate layer around with corner pin and drop the opacity way down (20-30 percent).

Red Giant has a super shadow plugin “Real Shadows” in it’s Image Lounge, but it a bit of money.

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/imagelounge.html

[Mike Clasby]

What Steve said, but a walk through here:
See part 3 of “Creating a Cartoon from Video” by Aharon (Click his head and scroll), he does exactly what you want, just sub in your paricular PS eye fix:

Part Three: Compositing your footage in After Effects

[Mike Clasby]

Like they said, Start with whole then blow it up with an effect, then time reverse.
What initial shape do you want the smaller pieces to be?

If square try Card Dance, with a many textured photo as “Gradient 1”, the x , y, z position with “Intensity 1” as Source, play with Multiplier. Card Dance is nice too because you can rotate the layers and also fly through with the camera in the plugin or use comp camera.

If just little flakes, try scatter. You may need grow bounds and of limited use if solids are large.

If little spheres try Ball Action. You can also twist the cloud of pieces.

If custom shape, try scatter and under shape,use a custom shape.

Particle Illusion and Trapecode do this a lot, Elvis over at the Cow PI forum here has a tut I think, click his head.

[Mike Clasby]

Andrew’s AE 101 is an excellent crash course, click on his head, scroll down to get there.

Although slightly dated (but holds up well) try this from the Editor’s Guild:

https://www.editorsguild.com/AfterEffects.html

then come back to the Cow, so many excellent tuts, and the pace and quality is only getting better.

[Mike Clasby]

Welcome Walter, the only thing I like more than After Effects is food.

[Mike Clasby]

If you change the last line of Dan’s opacity expression to:

if (idx >= index) wiggle(5,70) else 0

and the wiggle bit will make them twinkle, change the 5 (frequency) and the 70 (amplitude) to taste.

If you just want just 20 layers to twinkle have that last line in the 20 layers and the original last line in all the rest.

If you want to cluster the twinklers so they’re not lost in a sea of non-twinklers, precomp (move all attributes) the 20 layers and then reduce the size of that precomp, forcing them together.

Not trying to horn in here, Dan, but I plugged in your expression and love the look with the added twinkle. Glad to see your site back up.

[Mike Clasby]

If you change the last line of Dan’s opacity expression to:

if (idx >= index) wiggle(5,70) else 0

and the wiggle bit will make them twinkle, change the 5 (frequency) and the 70 (amplitude) to taste.

If you just want just 20 layers to twinkle have that last line in the 20 layers and the original last line in all the rest.

If you want to cluster the twinklers so they’re not lost in a sea of non-twinklers, precomp (move all attributes) the 20 layers and then reduce the size of that precomp, forcing them together.

Not trying to horn in here, Dan, but I plugged in your expression and love the look with the added twinkle. Glad to see your site back up.