Re: Turning people into sand by Steve Roberts on Feb 18, 2008 at 2:19:41 pm
You should know that AE is limited regarding realism. If you have a specific look in mind, you might have to compromise that if you want to use AE.
For example, if you want to do the same kind of camera moves and character movement that we saw in Spider-man 3, you're out of luck. That requires a 3D app or two, and a fair bit of time.
Re: Turning people into sand by Kevin Camp on Feb 18, 2008 at 5:27:58 pm
it would help to have a little better idea of what you are looking for, but cc scatterize is a simple way to turn a layer into tiny particles. adding an effect like 'fill' to animate the color of the layer to a sand like color as scatterize transforms the layer to particles and maybe a little blur and maybe some cc force motion blur can add to the effect (cc force motion blur may need to be on an adjustment layer or on a precomp of your person/sand layer).
the effect may be more of a dust cloud since i don't think cc scatterize has a gravity parameter, but it is very easy to use.
if you have particular (trapcode.com), you can set the layer as an emitter and have that layer turn into particles and the particle can change color over time. particular is a 3d particle system so you could do a camera move around the person/sand layer as it turns into sand. you can even set a 3d floor layer to have the 'sand' collect on the floor, which could be pretty cool. james lee did a pretty good tutorial using particular to erode a layer, the then time reverses the effect to have the layer come together from particles, but you could skip that part.
you may be able to do something similar with cc particle world, it's a 3d particle system bundled with ae. but i'm not sure how well it will 'explode' a layer, and although it has a 'floor' i've never tried to collect particles on it. but since it comes with ae free, it may be worth trying out.
