How to create a 3D, flat-looking sphere pattern

[Chris Evans]

Those are quite obviously 2d circles in a sort of curved, 3d funnel. I don’t think you could achieve that with any of the built-in plugins. I don’t have particular, but it might be possible to create something similar with it.

You might be able to create it manually. My thought: create one circle moving in a slight arch while scaling up. Precompose it, collapse transformation and duplicate it until you’ve got a circle of circles moving inward. Precompose all of them, collapse transformation again. Duplicate that comp a bunch of times, make them all 1 frame long (or however many frames long you need) then go to animate>keyframe assistant>sequence layers and let them all sequence. Freeze frame them all, extend them all back out and you should have a shape similar to the one you posted. It would take some time to get the timing correct, but it would be without any plugins. And if you need them all to move differently, you can animate the original differently. I hope this made sense.

[Joseph W. bourke]

I think the best way to create this is in Adobe Illustrator (or maybe Photoshop). Illustrator has all sorts of distortion envelopes, so you would just create a straight grid of circles, then apply an envelope. Another possibility would be to create your flat circle grid, then texture map it onto a curved surface in Element 3D or any other 3D package.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

How about a flat, but 3D-looking pattern of same kind?

9775_meshwarppattern.aep.zip