The Motion Boutique shows how you can drop letters on signs using Newton3 in Ae.

A while ago, there was a short directed by Gareth Smith & Jenny Lee called “Textless.” In it, the letters found in street signs floated or dropped away. The short relied heavily on Newton3 in After Effects to create the simulations. A new tutorial from the Motion Boutique team breaks down how that all works.

“our own tutorial that recreates the workflow to achieve this amazing effect where the content of a sign is falling drove by physics.” The tutorial uses Adobe After Effects and Mocha AE to track the signs. Newton3 handles all the physics and simulations. 

Also used is Adobe Illustrator to vectorize the artwork and Adobe Photoshop to clean up the sign using the content-aware tool.

That’s a lot of tools for a fantastic result. But don’t worry, everything is going to be quite easy to do.