It’s a surprise mid-week animation! Woah!
“Line Dance” is the result of a cool rig I created, and I’m pretty proud of the result. I couldn’t wait until Sunday to show off this piece, so I’m posting it on Tuesday. I started with Illustrator, where I made three concentric circles, each with 20 points.
I then pushed the illustration to After Effects, where I parented the inner circle and outer circle to their own nulls. I then used the beam effect to create the 20 lines you see in the final project. I used an expression to return the global position of a point on the inner circle and the outer circle. I then placed a null in the midpoint of each beam, that would serve as pivot points for the lines. When the lines were duplicated, and the pivots inverted, it created the little x’s. The beam effect also allowed the thickness to be controlled, so I parented those values to the scale value of the null controlling the inner and outer circles.
All of the animation in this piece was created by laying keyframes on three layers. The null that controls the inner circle, the null that controls the outer circle, and a third with sliders that controls the lines’ lengths and pivots.
When I revisit this animation, I’d like to see if there’s a way I can add trim paths to the beams. While I was able to control line length, the effect worked from the center of the line towards the ends, which affected the shapes I could make. If I could do it from the outsides in, I think the star created in the middle of the animation could have trimmed to just the star, creating a much cooler look.
