Animating many blades of grass?

[StanWelks]

I want to take lots of individual blades of grass created in Illustrator and bring them into AE, and make some of the blades of grass sway back and forth. I am very new to After Effects and am hoping to get some advice to get started correctly with this.

1. Since I will have many individual items (blades of grass) in AE that will need to be animated, is there any particular way I should prepare the Illustrator file, layers, etc.?

2. I understand basic keyframing, and might just do simple rotations with the blades, though is there another way that I might achieve smoother movement with the rotations? Are there any Effects and Presets that might be helpful with what I am doing?

3. Many of the blades of grass will just be repeated in the Illustrator file. What is the best way to create the animated blades of grass and just reuse the animations throughout the piece in AE?

Any help will be appreciated.

[Rick Gerard]

Personally I would put some of the blades of grass on one layer and others on another layer, then I would generate an animated fractal noise layer to act as a displacement map for each of these two layers. You will have to pre-compose the fractal noise layer to make it work as a displacement map.

You could also use any one of several distortion effects on two or 3 layers of grass so you're animating a bunch of blades of grass at the same time with just a little bit of work. Trying to animate a couple hundred blades of grass on individual layers is going to take forever and probably won't look that good when you're done.

If you have no idea what I am talking about then use the Search Help field at the top right corner of AE to look up displacement map, fractal noise, and distortion effects and do some studying.

[Roei Tzoref]

this can help:

moving grass motion

Re: How do I create this type of "bending" animation?

[Mylenium]

Don't bother with laying out the grass in AI. Simply create a bunch of prototypical stalks, animate them in AE in a pre-comp and then re-use those pre-comps with different timings and random time-remapping.

Mylenium

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi StanWelks,

Are you still facing this problem? If not, let us know how you solved it. If so, please let us know so we can assist you further.

Thanks,

Kevin