Letters "Blowing Away"?

I'd like to have a block of text on the screen, looking 2D, head on. Then, I would like it to look like a gust of wind from a fan comes from off camera left and blows the individual letters away towards screen right. Ideally they will scatter and rotate in 3D as they blow away off camera. Ideally the letters on the left would start blowing away slightly before the ones on the right, as the "breeze" would take longer to affect them.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a technique of doing this that doesn't involve manually keyframing each letter's motion? Either in After Effects or Motion perhaps? Maybe even Cinema 4D?

Looking at something akin to the rough image sequence in the link below:
imgur.com/a/yCyni

Thanks in advance for any advice?

I had a little play with this. Here's a Motion 5 file that has one approach in it for you to adapt.

It uses a 'null' object (circle with visibility turned off) and a repel behaviour to blow the text away. I've keyframes the influence parameter of the repel behaviour so that each letter is affected in sequence.

The letters all exist as individual objects with randomise behaviours on Z and Y rotations to achieve the 3D rotations that you wanted. The behaviours were trimmed to start when the letter moves.

There are probably more elegant ways to achieve this but I went straight at the problem due to lack of time.

At least it might get you on the right track.

Ian.

Sorry, the file didn't post. Try this link: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16919220/Blowing%20letters.motn

Ian.

Just tried the link and it comes down as text if you right click and choose download linked file. Just change the .txt extension to .motn and it works.