Simulated traffic jam with white dots

[Greg Burrus]

There are a number of ways to achieve that sort of effect.

One way is to use the After Effects Cocoe Battalion system. It was used to create a similar effect in there spot https://cocoe.com/?go=ibercaja and I have used it myself https://g2bproductions.com/2011/04/05/rit-sportszone-webextras-bump-2/. This has controls built in for randomness.

You can download it here ->https://cocoe.tumblr.com/post/182735282/after-effects-cocoe-battalion-some-time-ago-we

You could also try and create this using a real particle system using either the ones that come with ae, like cc particle systems, or trapcode particular.

You could also make your own expression that offsets the position of of the layer before. Here a tut on doing that https://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2011/03/de-sync-expressions-tutorial-by-sebastian/. you could then add some randomness to it.

hope this helps,

Greg

https://mogra.g2bproductions.com/ – Blog
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[Bow Jones]

Thanks a lot for the suggestion – very cool script! I’ve been playing with it all morning and still can’t quite get it to do what I want but I might use it in combination with just some snaking dotted lines.

[Kevin Camp]

assuming that you want dots to bunch up as they slow down, and spread out as they speed up, you could try animating just a single dot per path and adjust/use key frames to change the rate that they are moving, then add echo to replicate the dots to make a chain of them.

as the dots move faster, they will spread out, as they move slower they will bunch up. to keep the dot’s looking like they are moving (rather than a trail of dots) just make sure that the echo time is not a multiple of the frame rate (by default it is the duration of a single frame).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW