Shattering Bricks : Create a custom shatter map
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I had to blow apart a brick wall for the lower-thirds for the 14th season of The Jerry Springer Show, 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 into 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/maximum 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.
The Bricks with an alpha channel
Custom Shatter Map
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 is to 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.