I think Wax will run with Vegas.
However to do these kinds of FXs well I fear you're into the realm of serious 3D apps. These are one of the few fancy text thingies that I do like. The other one is text made of glass that fills with liquid, that I think takes a lot of serious code, just the liquid part is complex and on top of that serious amounts of number crunching.

I've used Wax to made text shatter, that works OK because you can do it very quickly.

Bob.

I'm with Bob on this.

I went to the TATE Modern this last Monday. I attended a demo/lecture given by 3 artists/programmers/innovators.

White flag here!! It was F"£$%ng AMAZING ! ! !

I now look at adverts with more than a little curiosity and cold bloodedness now. Much MUCH of what I thought was clever composition of REAL world situs, is in fact good old CODE! PERIOD!

There are companies JUST doing fire. There companies JUST doing fur .. . and so on . . one of the guys on stage specialised in organic VERY sexy tissue, pumping blood and mitotic cellular separation and filamentatious growth. He actually did that truly stunning I-Robotish "close" encounter with BJORG singing in the background. Wow!!! And THAT was all graphics.

Check out Glassworks and the MILL.

I had the temerity to approach the chaps afterwards in the Pub and mentioned I sometimes use PI - they were understanding and kindly nodded at me. Nice!

As I said, White Flag here! I surrender!

Tried the latest version of Wax. I dropped the transition on the fade portion of a text event. Vegas 7 crashed.

Anyone using Wax with V7?

Thanks
Mark

Yup. I tried Wax in V6 - no go.

In their user forum, somebody claims to have found a way to make it work in Vegas. It's the last two posts in this thread.

I don't know how to do what they are saying (add wax to a dep exceptions list) but I would imagine a search at Microsoft's site should find a way to do it.

Tried the solution. It lets Wax launch now, but it fails to finish the effect, saying it can't determine the video length.

I'll pursue this further on the Wax forum.

Mark

you can use wax outside of vegas (it's much faster).

this sounds like a good case for particles though. I'd imagine itwould work something like this;

the particles are all "contained" in the shape of the letters. You'd made a force "blow" them away, starting from the bottom.

or...

using a combo of Vegas's pan/crop mask & particles, you'd have particles "blowing" away & use the mask to hide your words as you move up.

not very detailed, huh? :) sorry!

see thread on wax in vegas 7

or go here

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/prodtech/windowsxp/depcnfxp.mspx

for step by step instructions on how to add "WaxInvoker.exe" to the "DEP exceptions list."

Possibly stupid question here but even if WAX is made to run how is it going to generate the desired effect?

If all that's needed is flat, rather 2D text that blows away here's an old school way to do this, you do need a camera though!

Cut the text out of cardboard to make a stencil. Get one of those serious, large aluminium salt shaker, nick one from McDonalds if need be (no don't, only joking). Drill the holes out a little so sand will flow though.

Lay stencil down on blue or green board, shake dry sand over it, lift stencil, roll camera, use fan, vacuum cleaner or blow really hard, to blow the sand away. For a treat reverse it in Vegas.

Bob.

nice low tech. :)

Bob,

Finally someone who thinks like me, outside of the computer box.

There is so much that can be done easier in the real world, we forget that computers aren't always the best answer.


Dave T2

(watch the spaceships on the original Star Wars and the computer generated spaceships of today. I much prefer the organic natural look of animated real objects.)

Yeah yeah yeah!

But this is not as real as CGI? Get a really good software package, and you can get it look real good. Honest! It is sooooo obvious that it s done on the cheap with this method.



















( . ps, I am larfing at meself here .. )

AE tutorial

i know its not vegas but may be worth a look

http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=http://www.creativecow.net/articles/eriksson_emanuel/sand/index.html

sorry my link failed too lazy to try again

risce1, you should be using this

Thing is Pathlight said "text crumble like sand". That to me implies starting with solid 3D text made of sand that I guess crumbles into piles of sand.
Sand itself is a complex 3D material, it's tiny grains of quartz. And they're of random shapes. Just one grain of sand isn't a trivial thing to create in a 3D app. You've got all the usual issues of reflection, diffraction etc and it's different for each grain. But here you're going to need millions of them. During the 'crumble' each one will interact with others as well as gravity.

If nothing else I can see this eating up huge amounts of CPU rendering!

Bob.

Does this animated photoshop title help?

That looks sad!

Think this is getting closer:

http://www.autodesk.com/mini-sites/story_alive/images/client/img07_BIG.jpg

And that's just a simple task, comparitively. And even that doesn't look all that good. I've seen this done on local TVCs and other FX where the 3D objects erode into particles. When wondering around NAB and CGI vendors want to show me their canned demos I ask them about doing these particles FXs. How to strike fear into a sales guy! They usually go find a T shirt guy real quick and then HE needs oxygen.

Bob.

Particle illusion has emitters which does just this..

PI SE (samller version) is less than a hundred dollars

Bob-

Using your previous low-tech method, couldn't you crease the blue/green (I'm thinking posterboard here) with about a 1 inch ridge just below the text? Then when you blow the sand letters down from the top, the sand would end up in piles at the crease.

What I'm assuming the original poster wanted was text, say 1M high, and 100mm thick made of sand, all 3D, all very real looking. The sand looses it 'magnetism' and flows down into piles.
That means a pretty big number of grains and each one of them is several polygons each.
I've seen this in commercials, I've seen cars dynamically built from text, I've seen things that slice into a zillion layers.

How to do this sand thing practically as a 3D solid?

If there was something that'd go straight from solid to gas that you could freeze the sand in might work. Carbon dioxide should work but that's a lot of work and would need a fair bit of caution.

Bob.

Thanks for all the good suggestions. I'm going to try Bob's sand stencil "real world" idea later today. Meanwhile, I spent yesterday working with the Boris Graffiti 4.0 demo and a "Sands of Time" Graffiti tutorial by Tim Wilson. It's at http://tinyurl.com/nubvw.

So far it's the best software-based approach I've seen. In fact, it was so good, I ordered the $149 upgrade from Graffiti LTD that comes with Vegas. I had stayed away from Graffiti because I couldn't get my head around it. But 5 hours with it yesterday and working through two of Tim Wilson's tutorials has me starting to feel comfortable.

Whichever way I go, I'll post a sample of the final result later this week and see what you all think.

Mark