This effect, or rather a rig is driven by a tool and a behaviour:

• Points to Path
• Noise

That’s it. It is super simple and you can do tons of stuff with it. Let’s discuss.

One tip I can give you, when using Points to Path > Array Distribution is to use Nulls. Create one Null for your path as this will make it much easier to visually adjust and art direct the whole effect. You don’t even need that many – the most Nulls I used was around 5. That’s it. Duplicator is doing the heavy lifting by making extra copies of the Path and this adds complexity to the look and feel of the design.

Noise is super versatile tool, but it contains a lot of controllers. And each of the controllers have certain effects “down the stream”. This specific setup required variation, but uniform variation. This is why I had to disable all the “seed variable” controllers, such as Position Context.

When testing your setup, you may get frustrated that your design does not look or behave the way you want. I would advice you to start slow and enable settings one at a time. For example, add Noise to your Null Controller. Set Min and Max values and turn off Position Context and set Stagger to 1. See what it does. Adjust Frequency. Review. Adjust seed. Review. Adjust Time Scale. Review.

By constant review and checks, we can isolate problematic settings much quicker, rather than simply throwing Noise at Controller and randomly selecting values.

And finally, reuse the Noise. By utilising Use Layer as Seed setting, we can reduce number of layers needed in our setup. And have the same movement and feel across multiple Null Controllers. I like to keep things simple and add complexity as needed, rather than create multiple layers that do similar thing.

In the examples below, you will see quite a few variations of similar design. Ignore the differences in movement – that’s just different Noise settings. See how I used different colours across different paths (use Color Blend + Stagger on Points to Path > Stroke Colour). Or how I “filled” paths with solid shapes (Points to Path > Fill > Color Blend – keep opacity low). Or how I made this big “folding wave carpet thing” with big strokes (Points to Path > Stroke > Width > use huge number here).

By adding extra variations on top of the existing system (Noise + Nulls), you can get a lot of crazy designs, with not much work. Simply, experiment, one layer at a time 🙂