From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Creating a swarm

Creating a swarm - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating a swarm

“

In the previous movie, I created this one randomly moving shape. I used the one wiggle for its scale and another wiggle for its position. Now let's create a whole bunch of these shapes. To do so, we want to use the Repeater to take this one shape and repeat it multiple times. So I'll select Add > Repeater. Initially, Repeater creates three copies. Let's create a bunch more, like 18 or so. Now the Repeater by default pushes things off in the X dimension, but even more important, if I just RAM-preview, you'll see that all these shapes are moving in unison. Well, that's a rendering-order issue. We're wiggling our shape. Then we're repeating that wiggle. Instead, we want to repeat our shape, then wiggle all those repeats. I'll RAM-preview. This is more what I wanted and while I'm at it, I'm going to cut down my offset to zero because I can go ahead and repeat them on top of each other and let them all wiggle independently. This is a lot more fun. I like this. I'm going to show you a…

Contents