Tag Archives: Experiment

Tutorial : Balloons with Newton2

Tutorial : Balloons with Newton2

The final product:

Music: “Against My Will” by The Fisherman

You can download the AEP with Newton2’s settings (CS6 and above) here.

In this example, I wanted to illustrate the Gravity Scale feature in Newton2, and how we can use it to simulate flying balloons that interact with their environment.
Gravity Scale allows you to set a custom gravity per body.
I’ve used Connect Layers to represent the ropes attached to the balloons.

There’s no “Flying in the air” option in Newton, but you can somehow make objects fly if you use a negative Gravity Scale value!

balloons gravity scale

You need to tweak some parameters to make it look correct: for instance, balloons have lower density and higher bounciness coefficient. I’ve also increased the Linear Damping value to fake air resistance.

balloons_settings

To add a sense of depth in the animation, I’ve used the Collision Group feature: the pink and green balloons collide with each other, but ignore the orange balloon. The little squares that simulate the ropes can only collide with the walls.

balloons_cg

I’ve animated the hand graphics using AE’s Motion Sketch. I wanted the ropes to start from a unique point, but animated freely when the hand releases them. I’ve simply parented the start point of 2 ropes to the animated one. Then in Newton, I’ve chosen the Kinematic body type for all start points. At the end of keyframes animation, when bodies become dynamic, ropes move independently!

balloons_parenting

Creating the ropes was made easy by the use of the Rope feature of Connect Layers. You just need to select the reference objects, and hit Rope.

balloons Connect Layers

 

One common mistake is to forget to place the anchor point of your objects to the desire place, where the rope must pass through. You usually think about this after creating the keyframes in Newton. To solve this, create a null object, place it appropriately, and parent it to the reference object. Then choose the null instead of the reference object for creating the rope.

balloons null connect layers

Download test scene

[wpdm_file id=1]

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Cloth Simulation Test

Cloth simulation test done with AE scripting and expressions.

  • particles (little circles) are setup on a grid
  • particles are connected with springs
  • force is applied
  • finally layers are created at center of each cell, with expression-driven orientation and corner pin to fit the cell

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Content Aware Fill

Quick experimentation attempting to use Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill feature on a video (actually images sequence).

TUTORIAL

USAGE

1. Open a video in After Effects and export it to a sequence of images
2. Using AE’s Tracker, track a point through the sequence
3. Select the track point, and execute the script posted below
4. Open Photoshop CS5 or CS6, and run the script ‘psBatchContentAwareFill.jsx’ created in step 3

Free material license

These scripts are copyrighted by Motion Boutique.
They are free for personal and commercial use but come “as is” with no warranty nor any free personal support.
Redistribution in any form is not allowed, instead always link to www.motionboutique.com for correct files.
By downloading any of these scripts, you agree the above terms.

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