Simulating Weightlessness on Many Layers

[Julio Crespo]

the expressions are not my best friends, after that…. Maybe a wiggle expression in the position property can work for you.

[Filip Vandueren]

I agree, a very slow wiggle will give a nice motion.

Or do you need ‘inertia’: do the layers have a certain motion and should they keep going in that direction infinitely ?

You could create a random timeless 3 dimensional point between [-1,-1,-1] and [1,1,1] and multiply that by the time.

something like:


seedRandom(1, timeless=true);
motion=random([-1,-1,-1],[1,1,1]);
speedFactor=50;

value + time*motion*speedFactor;


Anything else ? Be more descriptive in what would make the layer look ‘weightless’ to you.

[Justin Harris]

A slow wiggle sounds about right. What I’m looking for is each layer to be moving slowly in all three directions but each one independent of the others just as though they were floating in outer space with no gravity. I’m also hoping that this Expression can be applied to a Null which can act as kind of a master switch so that I don’t have to write a different expression for each layer. There are going to be a lot of layers in this comp. What would I write for that?

[Dan Ebberts]

I’d start with something like:

wiggle(.05,200)

and adjust it from there. You might also want to add something similar to the orientation property:

wiggle(.05,10)

You can apply a expression to a bunch of layers at once by Edit > Copy Expression Only then select all the other layers and paste.

Dan