[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

Unless it’s a 3D rig, which you can animate pretty easily, there is no other way around other than isolating on separate layers the single elements that you want to see moving and animate a couple of frames of rotation and position so that they can loop seamlessly, then apply a loop expression and activate motion blur to you liking (or use Force Motion Blur).

Hope this solves you problems.

Leopy

[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

You simply switched the two arguments of the expression in sampleImage (just like the video did..)
It should be:

sampleImage(position, radius), and in your case:

sampleColor = thisComp.layer(“Control Layer”).sampleImage(samplePoint, sampleSize)[0];

Hope it’s all clear.

Leopy

[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

It seems to me like it’s done by using a displacement map obtained from the luminance of a duplicate of that layer; in fact, as you can see, the brightest the region of the image is, the more it’s being displaced. If the trails you get are not as smooth as you would like them to be, try pre-composing the reference layer and inside the pre-comp use a fast blur set to a very low amount, 2-5px sould do the job; then maybe try setting the whole composition to 16 or 32 bits per channel (though I’m not sure wheteher the Displacement Map effect can actually work up to 16 bits).
Let me know if you have any more questions.

Leopy

[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

Oh, I see.
Ok then, let’s keep it that way! ?
Thank you so much for your help!
Bye bye!

[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

Oh my god you’re amazing!!!! ???
Thank you!
By the way, do you know how I could hide or integrate the effects so that, when I apply the preset, only the effects that I want to see actually show up while the others used to process the data in between the steps are not visible, yet still working? I.E., say I just want to see the layer control effect and the final point control, while other effects are hidden underneath the preset.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but it would be very handy 😉

[Leopoldo Perizzolo]

well, I don’t really remember ? I think I just wrote something like:
try{ *and the whole expression* }
catch(e){ *and nothing here* }

Could you tell me how I should set it up so that it can actually work?