how to create a looping moving road scene?

[Mike Clasby]

See your previous question below for looping.

This sounds like a slightly different question than below, without the rotation (which I didn’t fully understand), so if you want to know how to loop a moving road, this might be what you want.

Overview:
We need a layer that is the chunk of road as viewed from overhead, straigh overhead.
Then we’ll loop it with Effect>Distort Offset and a loop expression.
Then to give it perspective, Distort>Corner Pin

You need a chunk of road, just the road, from a bird’s eye view, looking straight down at the road from above. You could use a real photo of a road, from above. To make a road (a sidewalk really) I made a solid, 300×300, and used Render>Grid to make squares (Add mode and width adjusted), like a sidewalk.

Select your road layer (my sidewalk) and apply this effect, Distort>Offset. If you animate the Shift To Center’s Y from 0 at the beginning (set a Shift To Center keyframe)of the timeline, to say 300 a few seconds later (or whatever the height is of your road footage)then you will see the road slide down but fill itself at the top as it does.

Now Alt Click the Shift To Center stopwatch and Paste in that loop expression:

loopOut( “cycle”, 0)

Now you will have a continuously looping road that flows past, as seen from above, as long as the layer is.

OK you probably want perspective, so that the road stretches out to the horizon, so apply, Distort>Corner Pin, and drag the Upper left and right out to the horizon and slide them together a bit, then drag the Lower pins to the bottom of the comp and spread them out. You should have you looping road that stretch out to the horizon, so you animated character can take a walk… all day long.

[David Lieberman]

GENIUS!!! would never have thought of that… many thanx mate!!! off the top of my head, if i wanted to create a road with bushes or trees on the side would it distort the image?

and if not, would i just create duplicates of this image so the trees are looking different and in different position every time it loops?

thanks a lot for the help!!!

dave

[Delete]

Keep in mind that AE has the 3D capabilities of a 80 arcade game and you can simulate any 3d motion in 2d space.

You could always create a massive z depth world from photoshop layers and spit, and animate a set of cameras through it. It won’t look perfect, but set the motion blur, precomp it and add a lens distort and zoom blur, for speed effect.

[Liran Tabib]

here is a nice tutorial on creating a looping road animation:
https://www.vdodna.com/tutorials/13-endless-road/
Enjoy