Newton Physics Engine for After Effects

Posted August 29th, 2011 / By Matthew Carlin in Featured, Resources, Reviews, Software

What is Newton?

If you haven’t heard on newton yet, then where have you been? Newton was announced by Motion Boutique a few months ago and the motion graphics industry started getting excited.

Newton is essentially a 2D physics engine for Adobe After Effects users. It means we can have realistic physics in our 2d animations. The plugin does this by making each layer a rigid body, and then once you have a simulation completed, it converts it back into normal After Effects keyframes.

from on .

How do you work with Newton?

To begin working with newton you have to first install the plugin. This is really simple though; it’s essentially a case of copying the Newton folder to your AE plugins folder. However, once you’ve opened After Effects it will actually appear as an extra option in the composition menu at the top instead of appearing where plugins usually appear.

Now we can start working with Newton. It’s actually fairly simple to start working with. First of all you have to get your composition imported/set up. It’s probably important here to start deciding what kind of physics animation your looking for as in the next step we’ll start assigning different properties to our different layers.

Once you’ve got your composition fully imported and ready, it’s time to assign Newton to it. To do this all you need to do is go up to the composition menu and click Newton. You’ll then be presented with the Newton settings window.

This is where all the action in Newton happens. There are 4 sections to this, the first is your simulation preview where you’ll see the results of the settings your about to assign to your different layers. The next key section here is bodies. This is where you select your layers and you assign what type of body they will be. For this you have a choice of Static, Kinematic, Dynamic, Dormant, AEmatic and Dead. Each one of these will mean give a layer or “body” differences in the way it affects or is affected by other layers. You also get some options for each layer here on how dense the body is, how much bounce it has and friction amongst some other things.

Once you’ve assigned all your layers the particular body top you would like, you can have a look at the global gravity section and make adjustments here. You can also adjust the solver and how many iterations it has.

Now you’ve assigned and changed all these settings it’s time to run the simulation preview to see how your simulation looks. Click solve and you will see how your simulation in action. If your not happy with how the simulation looks, you can go back and adjust your settings, restart your simulation and see if it looks better. You can keep doing this until your happy with how the simulation looks, and then it’s time to transfer this to your composition.

This is pretty simple too, click apply at the bottom of this window and you’ll get another set of options before you export.

Here you can that you get a couple of options such as the number of frames you want to export, whether you want to apply motion blur to your layers and then finally if you want to create a new composition out of your simulation instead of applying it to the original composition.

Once you’ve done that click OK and it’ll convert the simulation into keyframes in your composition. The basics of Newton are as simple as that.

A word of warning here, if your happy with your simulation, you have the option to save your settings in the Newton configuration window. I would suggest doing this as you each time newton is ran it essentially resets itself, and you don’t want to have to type all your settings in again.

So what can kind of things can Newton do?

I would show you some examples of what Newton can do myself, but i think Motion Boutique has got some great examples themselves, so here are some videos to show you how to work with Newton. The plugin also comes with a number of sample project files so you can see how some of these are done and give you a starting point for your own.

from on .

from on .

from on .

Is it worth buying?

After having a play around with Newton and seeing how easy it is to get going with it and start applying physics to your layers, i would definitely say it’s worth it. The quality of the animation and the extensive settings makes it worth the price tag and if you’re wanting to do alot of this kind of animation without having to resort to expensive applications for physics simulations then this is definitely the plugin in for you. I imagine that the longer the plugin is around the better the physics will get.

This is definitely something i would reccomend.

Hi, I’m from Nottingham in the United Kingdom. I’ve been writing about motion graphics on Motion Design Love for a while now, as well being a Video Editor and Motion Designer by Day. I probably spend most of my waking hours either doing something with motion graphics or thinking about stuff I can do with motion graphics. I’m looking forward to writing some great articles for Fuel Your Motionography, I hope you’re all looking forward to reading them!