hi I'm Ben Marriott I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials and today
I'm going to talk to you how to set up this effect to smash absolutely anything
in After Effects let's begin
alright so we've got our comp set up with a lollipop ready to smash out object I've
had animated this on a two second loop and I've got the impact of the lollipop
smashing happening at the very first frame if we click our rotation and
go into our graph editor we can see how that looks like in here it goes down
gradually and then at the end sort of picks up ready for another swing I've
also got a bit of animation on the shadows of the lollipop here as well you
can download this project file and have a closer look at those too but let's
focus on the smashing effect for now I'm going to shy all these layers so we're
only paying attention to our smashed object and the null have got here so
I've got my tooth layer which is an illustrator file over here so I'm just
drawn this in Illustrator and imported it to Dinn you could also use a shape
layer you use a photo a text a comp even video footage and I'm going to show you
later how we can quickly swap out all our objects to make the smash effect
apply to anything at all now first let's precomp this tooth with them ctrl shift
C and let's call this tooth and let's move this into position so the very
first frame we want to make contact with our lollipop and we want that to happen
right in the centre so let's zoom in just nudge it with our arrow tools here
so here is where tooth is gonna make impact at the beginning but we also need
to animate it coming in from screen left so I'm going to duplicate this comp with
ctrl D and then I'm gonna animate it to position property here
play that back we can see generally how the timing of this animation is gonna
play out I want to duplicate this bottom tooth
comp with control D and then I'm gonna rename that shard01 this is gonna
become the first shard of this tooth as it smashes its bottom tooth layer I'm
gonna use only as a reference layer so I'm gonna click on T and bring the
transparency down to it maybe 20% I'm also gonna use an image of smashed glass
as some reference here so I want to scale this up and I'm going to take the
transparency of that down to maybe 20% as well I want to move it into position
to get some more interesting shapes here and this is just so we can see what kind
of shapes like actual glass smashing will look like and you can use sort of
crumbly concrete or some more debris or anything else together type of shard
shapes you'd like let's Lock this layer so we don't accidentally move it and
let's change the color of these so we can see where they are at a glance so
let's select that pen tool up here and we're gonna draw our first shot by
creating a mask I'm start on the top right corner come
here just by clicking I want to create a mask it's gonna be roughly a similar
sort of shape to what these broken glass shards are here and now we've
closed off that mask we've got this one piece of our comp selected to create our
second shard I'm gonna duplicate this comp with ctrl d it'll automatically
rename itself which is very handy and I'm just gonna drag these right sort of
at the right place this mask tool and drag them over to the left and line them
up to create sort of a second the second shard here now I'm not going to touch the
ones on the right which we're making up the left side of our shard one and this
means that they will line up exactly so make sure not to move these sides and
the shard three we're going to duplicate this again move the
anchor points around it's another time you can even add some more points if you
want to get some more variation in here I'm just gonna continue doing this
clockwise around the tooth until we get back to the other side
now we've got all the shards let's go in and delete this smashed glass layer cause you don't
need that let's delete our bottom tooth reference layer cuz we won't need that either
and now it's going to split some of these shards up so they just look a
little bit more broken to do then I'm gonna select shard three and I'm gonna
solo this layer by clicking it over here so now that's the only layer visible
we're gonna select that pen tool again and I'm just gonna draw a mask that's
just gonna split this layer in half but it doesn't quite split it in two adds
this section back would already hidden that is because both masks are set to
add and we press M on my keyboard it'll show and mask properties here both they
set to add so what that means it's each shape that I've drawn with the mask tool
here is adding back to what area of the comp is visible so we change a second
mask to subtract it'll subtract it and remove that section just like we
want the order of the masks are in will also affect this after effects applies
the masks from the top down so we'll add mask one and then subtract mask two but
if we move the mask two above we get a completely different result
it's subtracting this pink shape that we've drawn and then it's adding back
this sort of cyan sort of triangle lightning bolt shape on top of that as
well so let's swap those back and let's rename this shard 3a and let's duplicate
that with command D and call the shard o 3b I'm gonna grab these handles of the
mask and flip them over so it's gonna draw the second half and if we nudge
shard o 3b you can see that this section is now split into two let's move those
back this method make sure that there are no gaps between any of our pieces
let's unsolo of those and I might do that for a couple more pieces down
here as well now we've got all our shards let's
animate them smashing outwards so I'm gonna select all of them holding shift
and press P to bring up my position property now let's get at one second in
and we're gonna move them into their final position so I'm gonna select each
layer then I'm just gonna drag with my arrow tool drag it out away from this
impact area I'll do that for all the layers
all right now make sure to spread them out evenly so there's roughly the same
negative space between each one even the shards were split into two now
let's watch back and see what it looks like all right we can see it's kind of
getting there now we need to add some nice easing to
this smash animation I want to add a really steep easing to this impact
So I'm gonna just drag up our timeline here I'm select all of
our keyframes and I'm gonna press f9 to put an easy ease on them and let's go to
our graph editor so with all these key frames selected I'm gonna push this one
to the left and then push this one to the left also now that's as far as it
goes so let's see how that one looks that's not bad
I think actually want this to go over a little bit more time so let's drag these
back keyframes over again even further to the right this animation will happen
over a long period of time oh yeah I think that's looking pretty good now now
at the end here we've got these sort of pieces just cutting away before our next
two flies in it's up to you how you like to animate them sort of moving off
screen you can do them sort of animating into a sliver of nothing with a mass
property so if you press M keyframe your mask path and then towards the end here
you simply draw the path sort of being reduced to nothing if we do that for a
few shard let's see what that looks like
so this I'm sort of sort of slithering into invisibility for the next tooth
comes in if you like them to fall down like some shadow things would naturally
in real-life physics you can keyframe that position a little bit later on
track them down off-screen you need to play with the easing to make that look a
little bit more natural now the benefit of using composition and slicing this
all up in masks rather than you know slicing up in illustrator or another
program beforehand is that you can go and swap out the object being smashed
here you simply open the comp drag in another asset hide the tooth comp and if
we go out because it all updates and animates procedurally so you can smash
absolutely anything you like an image smash avocado smash text even Billy
Corgan the possibilities are endless this profile is available for download
down in the description if you've used anything you've learned in this video
please tag me at ben_marriott_on Instagram so I can see
what you've smashed and shattered please let me know down in the comments what
else you'd like to see from this channel and don't forget to subscribe hit that
Bell icon like share check out this playlist of other related tutorials I'll
see you in the next video
Subtitles: Zoe J Marriott