Tutorial 190: Sierpinski
Added 2019-09-13 22:47:00 +0000 UTCMan, we had a busy week, so our apologies that this couldn't come out sooner, but we hope it was worth the wait!
In building something for a client last week, I came up with an interesting movement using our generative paths from Tutorial 190: Cicada. At the same time I was doing more experiments with L-systems and so I coded a sort of Logo or Turtle graphics expression inside of After Effects. So this is the result of that.
The base premise is that we take the total number of points and fit them into a Trim Paths operation—or a pointOnPath() expression—by fitting the total number of points into 100. So we divide 100 by our total number of points, and set keys to move the end of our trim by that tiny increment. Then using loopOut('offset'), we have that tiny path move down the whole path. Setting our trim's start to be just a tiny bit away from the end effectively lets us use strokes that extend past the end like round or projecting caps to make circular or square dots.
There's a lot of additional things that can be done. After recording, I even built a system to put layers at specific positions matching the points of these generated paths so that anything could follow the paths in this mechanical fashion. By adding multiple points together, you could even make interesting animated shapes with these, which we'll probably do for Patron files this month. Also, that position setup found it's way into the project files if you want to buy them below.
Have fun experimenting with this! It's a rabbit hole.
