

Now instead of a daisy-like pattern with a return to the center every second we get loops. What happens if I put it out of phase by half a second, as in the graph below? value + * 500 In the above expression the y component is out of phase 12345 seconds, a whole number. Since you know that the value will return zero at when the seed is an integer, you can make sure the seed you give it is an integer at the beginning and end of the loop. This could be very useful for random behaviour that you want to loop. every whole second, noise() returns zero, which means at that point both x and y come back to the origin. If you look at the graph of the expression something is immediately apparent: even though both components are varying smoothly and somewhat randomly, at the points where the time is an integer, i.e.

The reason for this daisy-shaped path can be seen from the graph of the position of the noise layer, and highlights an interesting and useful property of noise(). Here’s the path that each layer takes first wiggle: wiggle(1, 500) Interestingly the distribution of the wiggle function doesn’t seem even there is a bias towards lower values. If you look at the difference between the noise layer and the wiggle layer you’ll see that wiggle wanders more, where noise keeps returning to the center. The * 500 scales the movement up so that it fills the comp, and to move it to the center I added the layer’s original position to the expression adding the term value. To create interesting movement I slipped the x and y components out of phase (more on that later).


The reason why I added 12345 to the time for the y component was that if I’d used noise(time) for both terms, they would have always been the same, meaning the layer would just move along a diagonal line. noise always returns the same result for the same input, so to get it to change over time, I used time as the input. This is why I had to call it twice, once for each component of the position vector. Value + * 500Īccording to the Adobe docs, noise can take a number or an array as its one parameter, but it always returns a number between -1 and 1.
