mamoworld

In this After Effects tutorial we will combine the ExpressionTimeline with the new plugin Plexus to create an impressive title animation. In addition I show you a useful expression to loop the keyframes of a property.

Contents

1. Creating and animating text in Plexus (1:11-13:01)
2. Animating a Plexus point cloud using ExpressionTimeline(13:02-38:04)

Expressions

In the tutorial we use the following expressions

• Random grid movement by Dan Ebberts
• Random Motion by Dan Ebberts
• The following expression allows to loop the keyframes of a layer with various options:

  var lastFrame=50;
  var offset=index;
  var speed=0.05;
  
  valueAtTime((time*speed+offset*thisComp.frameDuration)%
              ((lastFrame+1)*thisComp.frameDuration))
  

  You can adjust the numbers behind lastFrame, offset, and speed:
  • lastFrame: Setting this to 50 means that the 50 first frames of the composition are looped. You can also loop any shorter or larger regions
  • offset: offset=10 would mean that the loop runs though the frames 0 to 50, but starts at frame 10 instead of frame 0. If you set this not to a fixed number, but to something like index or 5*index, the offset becomes different for different layers such that they are all at different positions in the loop.
  • speed: by changing this number, the loop runs slower (small numbers) or faster (large numbers). For var speed=1 the loop runs at its original speed.

After Effects Project Download

tut-plexus-en.zip (99 KB)

The project also requires the font pigiarniq.zip.