• Go back into your ramp composition and change the ramp shape from linear ramp to radial ramp:

  

• In your shatter composition, enable the Invert Gradient checkbox under the Gradient section of the Shatter Effect in the Effect Controls window:

  

• Take a look at what our new gradient did:

• If we use a somewhat random thing like this as our Gradient Layer, we will get this shatter:

• If you are trying to achieve an organic shatter, then an old photograph will often do the trick:

• In addition to manipulating the Gradient Layer, you can also create Custom Shatter Maps to tell the effect what shapes to break into. These techniques move into advanced territory rather quickly, so we’ll just have a little taste of it here.

• By making another composition, (called noise), creating a new solid and applying the noise effect to it (Effect Stylize Noise), I get a frame like this:

If you bring the noise comp into the shatter comp, then under the Shatter Effect’s Shape attribute, set Pattern to Custom and Custom Shatter Map to the noise layer, the shape of the shattered bits change into bits of sand (in accordance with the noise texture):

I should point out that this is not really how to make a shatter map. “Real” shatter maps use red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, cyan, white, and black shapes that are carefully placed to produce the desired effect. The noise trick is pretty cool, though.

Another somewhat quick custom shatter map can be made by making another comp with the same text, only white, and with white outlines. Make sure that the letters do not touch. Use that nested comp as your custom shatter map:

• I imagine that by this point you are shattered out. If not, here are a yet a couple more things to experiment with:

Although the shatter pieces do not render in After Effect’s virtual 3-d environment, shatter will make it seem like it does, if you use a 3-d camera:
After you have created a camera, select Comp Camera from the Shatter Effect Controls window, and animate your camera as desired:

MESSING WITH GRAVITY

You can change the strength, direction, and inclination (toward or away from you) of gravity under the Physics attribute of the Shatter Effect. For instance, you could have a weak force shatter a layer, but a very strong gravity pull it all straight at the virtual camera: