Create soft bodies that react to a predefined animation using Newton2 and Connect Layers.
Motion Designer Lok Fu show us how he rigged the head and the neck of his horse using Newton2 and Connect Layers.
02. Launch Newton, use the pivot joint to connect the body, neck and face (all the boxes). And tick the “Enable Limit” box, set the lower and upper angle to control the amplitude of those elements. Then tick out the same group from the “Collide With” box to make sure the boxes won’t affect each other.
01. First, animate the BODY (the boxes will follow the animated shape)
03. Turn the BODY to Kinematic to use the animation done in After Effects in step 1.
04. And let the neck and face Rock the world…
05. Finally simply just use Connect Layers to connect the boxes to create the smooth neck and the face.
The image above show how the horse reacted with the environment using Newton. But In the very beginning I just had no idea how to make the boxes looks smooth, then I’ve tried Connect Layers. The hair are done with Trapcode – Particular.
About the deformed circles.
The circles is created by a lot of little boxes, and all linked by the distance joint. The key is to set all the boxes anchor point at the same location, and set them as AEmatic bodies, so that they can be deformed by the horse because of the AEmatic tension. Also all the boxes will affect by each other via the distance joints to make the circle looks smooth. Finally use connect layers to connect all the boxes to create the circle outlook. The attached screen shot is the Newton setting, and you can see the testing result from the CNY14 testing animation (at 1″27).
Thanks Lok Fu!
Thank you for sharing this.