Rotating collision tests

I've been testing out a few new ideas and techniques for one of my animations; one where letters are caused to rotate after a collision before falling down. It was one of the first sequences I chose to tackle using my chosen colour and typeface, as it requires using some 3d techniques which took a bit of time to learn.

I had a quick go at rotating the letters from a side view to a front view:

Rotating Collision test 1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

I noticed that the 'E' did not quite react properly, realistically it would bounce back the other way after the collision, so I've fixed that up:

Rotating Collision test 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

I think it looks a little more realistic.

Then again I'm not overly happy about the 3d aspect of it, so I've been messing around with actually extruding the shapes of the letters to make them properly 3d as such. After Effects doesn't seem to have a normal function to make things 3d without the help of plugins or something like that, so it seems that in order to make proper 3d you have to cheat the Shatter effect into taking the shape of a letter, extruding it and then reducing all the force/gravity strength factors down to zero, to leave you with a solid 3d layer. A crafty method I learnt off the internet. Here's the development videos:

Collide 3d test from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

A second with slightly improved keyframe velocity:

collide 3d test 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

And finally with the letters falling at the end:

collide 3d test 3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

With a few improvements I reckon this could well be nearly completed; perhaps with some slight texturing for a bit of added effect.