Inspired by what Lok Fu created with the Newton2 Physics Engine for After Effects, The Motion Boutique set out to test creating soft body forms using the Connect Layers script and Newton2, with some pretty fantastic results. If you haven’t seen the animation that Lok Fu in question, you can see that here – Using Newton2 for a Character’s Secondary Animation.
[blockquote source=”The MotionBoutique”]Inspired by the work of Lok Fu, we conducted some tests to create soft bodies using Connect Layers[/blockquote]Although Newton2 is strictly a 2D physics engine meant for rigid body dynamics, this works surprisingly well. The idea behind creating soft bodies in After Effects lies in creating the form of the object with smaller simpler shapes, and connecting those shapes together.
This is where the Connect Layers Script comes in, making it ease to set up the connections between all of the objects needed.The MotionBoutique has a post outlining the process for creating soft body dynamics using Newton2 here. They also post the AEP file (CS6 and above) and the settings file for Newton2.
