A close up of earth with ‘information lines’ bouncing from city to city?

[Michael Szalapski]

With the limited information you’ve given in your post, it would be hard to offer useful advice. There are dozens of different looks you could be going for. Is this a stylized globe or more photo-realistic? What sort of camera angle are we talking about? How “3d” do you need this to look?

A simple search pulls up a ton of results.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matt Davis]

Here are a couple of bricks along the road for you, depending on what look and feel you want for this.

Some effects you might use: Spherise, CC Sphere

I’ve done a globe before, but I don’t recall which I used. It was one of them for sure.

For information lines, you would map those out on a layer(s) above your map and precomp with your map before applying the sphere effect. Then, it depends on if you want the ligns to be persisitent or only to come on as the information goes around.

You might try using a lens flare as your information packet moving along the lines. Might get processor heavy, depending on how many lines and info packets we’re talking about. But you could also export a few before you turn it all into a sphere and composite more on top, then sphere it up. 🙂

Hope that’s a start anyway

[Darryl Torke]

I’m sorry I didn’t clarify.

It can be very illustrative/design-y, however the difficulty that I can’t seem to find (and trust me I did do a search before i posted) is making the lines ‘bounce’. The few solutions I’ve found require a 3D program and I was simply hoping there was a after effects solution for the ‘bounce’ lines (not just a 2d line rolling along the sphere).

I understand if this is beyond the realm of after effects. Thanks for your time anyhow.

[Darryl Torke]

Thanks for your help. Would you know if it’s realistic to try to make the lines ‘bounce’, as in, they start from ground level at the origin point then go up in the air, then go back down at the destination point? Or do you think this is not possible in AE.

thanks again for your help.

[Michael Szalapski]

It’s possible in AE, just really tricky. If you have CC, you could make it in Cinema 4D which now comes free with After Effects.

A totally AE solution would involve CC Particle World or Particular, but getting it to match up with your globe would be difficult. Not impossible though. It would involve some fun expressions to get the particles to follow the globe. Unless the globe isn’t spinning much…

I’ve got a few different ideas of how you could go about it with Particular, but if you have CC, the true 3d route would probably be easier. I know it would for me.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matthew Keane]

There’s a tutorial here that might help if you want lines curving through the air over your sphere:
https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/create-a-world-traveler-animation-to-show-where-in-the-world-youve-been–ae-23354

[Matt Davis]

You mean sort of like a plane taking off and then landing at it’s destination? Is the line bouncing or is the data following along the line?