I had to blow apart a brick wall for the lower thirds for one season of Jerry Springer, and I wanted to use a custom shatter map, but
found that there are no good resources that explain how to create one...
at least, I didn't come across any...
There is a brick shatter map built-in to shatter, but these bricks are
nice straight edged bricks. We want old world bricks like you'd find in
Galway Ireland, more like rocks stacked up than nice brickwork.
Instructions
Create bricks in an image editing program. You can use a photo if
you like. Make an alpha channel of the area that you want to shatter -
in our case, the bricks. Save it as a pict file, calling it, aptly,
"bricks".
Now, create the shatter map. The RGB images uses eight colors:
white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta yellow and black. I used all but
magenta. Use the hottest color you can - example, 255 red, 255 blue,
etc. Black will be the area that will not be knocked out. Randomly color
the bricks, and don't leave mortar between the bricks, either. You'd
think that this area would be black, but trust me, it's not. Just use
minimum/maximim in Photoshop to make your bricks a little bigger, or do
it manually, or maybe you have another little trick up your sleeve. If
you're wondering, putting the mortar between the bricks will give you
long flat chunks in your shatter. If that's what you want, then by all
means, add mortar, but that's not the look we're going for.
Okay, now it's time to import your bricks and shatter map into After
Effects. Create a new comp that is the same size as your images.
Place your 2 files in the comp with the bricks as your top layer and
the shatter map as your bottom layer. It doesn't really matter, but for
this tutorial, that's what we're doing. Turn off the visibility for the
shatter map.
Apply shatter to the bricks layer. Effect > Simulation >
Shatter.
There are tons of settings that you can use, but we'll stick to just
a few. The rest are yours to tweak. Here are the settings for shatter:
Under shape
Pattern: custom
Custom Shatter Map: Your map
The rest of the settings are up to you.
Tips and Tricks:
To see what tile shapes will result from your test map, apply a
threshold effect to each channel individually at 50%. A simple way to do
this isto use the Posterize effect set to its minimum of two levels. You
can look at the result and see what Shatter will trace.
When trying to animate highly detailed images, shapes which are not
anti-aliased work better.
Use a full size image of noise to create a dust effect.
The easiest way to reverse a shatter is to create your comp forward
then create a new comp and reverse the time of your original comp.
Michele
Yamazaki is VP of Marketing for Toolfarm.com
where she focuses on web design and content development.
She teaches Adobe After Effects at an art college.
Previously, she worked at a post-house for ten
years and ran an After Effects website called
AE FreeMart. She is a contributing author to the
CMP book 'After Effects @ Work'.
