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In this tutorial, we’ll make a cool chrome text effect in Photoshop then import the .psd into After Effects as a composition and customize the built-in Shatter effect to make the text appear as if its crumbling apart. A very cool effect that can be used on pictures and video as well.

Here’s the final:

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Create the text effect

Open Photoshop and make a new document with a size of 720×480 (I’m creating this for video so my size is 720×480 but if yours is for your website, a good size is 320×240). One additional note here, if yours is for video, set the aspect ratio image>aspect ratio to the appropriate setting, or else just leave it at square pixels. Make the background a dark gray for now and type in some white text and make the font fairly thick, I’m using impact.

Right-click on the text layer in the layers palette and select rasterize type (CS3). Ctrl-Click on the text layer in the layer palette to select it and go to the channels panel. In the channel palette click the “create new channel” icon in the bottom tool bar. It creates a new channel called Alpha:

Go to edit>fill and fill the selection with white. Ctrl +d to deselect. Next we add 3 Gaussian blurs. Go to filter>blur>gaussian blur and set the pixel radius to 6 for the first one. Do this two more times setting the pixels to 4 and then 2.

Go back to the layers palette and select the text layer. Add a light effect by going to filter>render>lighting effects and use these settings to give the text a nice bevel effect:

Next we’ll use curves to give the text a chrome effect. Go to image>adjustments>curves and use similar settings to mine. You might have different settings due to the font your using (thin or thick) but the general shape of the curve below should be similar:

The last two things we need to do to complete the effect are, add one more lighting effect and a drop shadow. Once again, go to filter>render>lighting effects and change the light type to directional and use the settings below to get the blue glow off of the bottom:

Lastly, add a drop shadow to complete the effect. I included the dark gray background here to show the effect better but you’ll want to delete it so you can import it into After Effects with a transparent background. Save the Photoshop file as shatter.psd :

Use After Effects and the Shatter effect to crumble the text

Open After Effects and choose file>import>file and select the shatter.psd we made. Before you close the import file dialog box, notice below the “import as” and a drop down box. In the drop down box, select composition:

In After Effects, create a new comp and name it “main” and set the aspect ratio to match your Photoshop file (see above). Make it the size of your Photoshop file (in this case 720×480) and set the duration to 11 seconds. Now, drag and drop the shatter comp into the main comp:

If you didn’t delete the grey background in Photoshop before you saved it, double click on the shatter comp in the project window to gain access to the Photoshop layers and delete it there, otherwise the shatter effect will apply to that layer also. Make the background color of the “main comp” a dark gray or black color by using composition>background color.

Next, create a new comp and name it “ramp” (also 11 second duration). Typically this effect is used with a black to white gradient made with the ramp effect. When using a black to white gradient, the shatter effect will shatter the light parts before the dark parts, but, since we want to randomly crumble the text, we’ll use a busy photo with varying degrees of black and white in place of the gradient. Download this image and import it into After Effects and place it into the “ramp” comp. Scale it to fit the comp then drag the “ramp” comp into the “main” comp and turn off the eye:

In the “main” comp, apply the shatter effect to the “shatter” comp (effect>simulation>shatter) and apply these settings:

Depth and radius may vary depending on the amount of text or size of picture your shattering. Just make sure the radius expands to cover the entire object your shattering. Also, the effect won’t work unless you animate the shatter threshold. I set a keyframe at 1 second and 0% shatter threshold and a keyframe at 9 seconds with 100% shatter threshold. It’s important the gradient layer gets set to “ramp” or else the crumble effect won’t happen. The last two important settings are strength and repetitions. The amount of repetitions determines the size of the pieces being shattered. Keep in mind the more repetitions the more taxing it is on your computer when you go to render it out. The strength is set low so the pieces will fall rather than explode out. That concludes this tutorial. Hope you enjoyed it.