How to achieve this dithering animation?

[John Cuevas]

The easiest way would be to use Trapcode Form or Particular. Then you would have all the particles created and in the start position and then use a force to displace break them apart. That’s why it looks different than the one you are trying to recreate, the particles are moving from the initial position to a new position from the force and then move back to the start position when the force moves away.

I’ll take a look and see what can be done in AE without purchased plugins.

[Graham Quince]

I spent 10 minutes playing and got relatively close with the Card Dance effect with circle effect on another layer as the gradient. It might be worth seeing if that approach can work for you.

Failing that, the SampeImage() expression can displace a layer based on another layer.

I found this video which shows something similar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=1UaZNcVobhg

Basically, arrange your particles into a shape, with each on running its own expression.

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[Goncalo Torgal]

Thank you for your kind answers! I will try these to see if I can get there. I feel the original one wasn’t done in After Effects, but through coding. That’s why it might not be so intuitive on how to recreate this.

[John Cuevas]

I had to go really old school, but I think I figured out how to do create this effect. I used Particle Playground, an effect that was created in 1992!

Drop your shape(I’m calling it the snowflake) into a new composition. Create a solid, add Particle Playground. PP has 3 different particle systems and you want to use the layer exploder system. So open up “Cannon” and turn the particles per second to 0.

Open up “Layer Exploder” and choose Snowflake. If you play right now, you will see two things. The particles falling off the screen and new particles being created. So first go to gravity and change Force to 0. Now, go to the first frame of your comp on the snowflake layer, set the an opacity keyframe at 100, move 1 frame forward and set the opacity to 0. Layer exploder creates particles where ever it finds some something in the Alpha/RGB channels. This stops the creation of new particles. In my example, in the Layer Exploder, I set the Radius to 5, you will want to adjust to taste. A radius one of one gives pretty cool results at the end, but will slow the render down.

Create a new composition and call it Repeller. This is where you will create your force. I started with a circle shape. Had a couple of keyframes move it across the screen, and added wiggle to it’s position. Next I created a solid, added turbulent noise and adjusted the settings to create an evolving noise map with a fairly high contrast. I used the shape layer as a luma matte for the noise. Finally, I added an adjustment layer and added colorama and set the output to RGB. Lastly, I added a fast box blur to make it a little bit smoother of a transition.

Add the comp Repeller to your main composition. Now just go into the Ephemeral Property Manager. The is the short term effects property, your map will affect the particles when it hits the particles but they go back to there initial state when unaffected. Set the Layer Map to your “Repeller” layer. Now twirl down the Affects and use one of the colors to map the X, One to Map the Y, and you still have a third that you can use to map any of those other properties. I chose scale. Adjust the Min/Max and Operators to taste and you are good to go.

Take a look at my attached example project.

Particle-Playground-Final.zip 321 KB Zip - Click to view

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Particle-Playground.mp4 19 MB MPEG-4 - Click to view

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[John Cuevas]

Here is a great video that will really help you dig into this old school effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzzEy76cCXo

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