Help to reverse-engineer logo stroke reveal

[Matt Young]

A number of years ago my company had a third party create some brand animations.  I've now been tasked with taking a part of one of those animations and extending it as a longer logo hero loop for a webpage.

They want the 'C' in the video below to animate on as it currently does, but instead of animating directly off, as it currently does, it should stay at full size but stay animated with a shimmery solar atmosphere sort of vibe.

Fortunately, I have the original AE project file supplied by the external company.  Unfortunately, it turns out the layer shown above is a png sequence. 

Do I need to re-build this from scratch to have the control I need, or is there a way to add a shimmery, smoky, solar atmosphere-like motion to a freeze-frame of this PNG that would match the look and feel of the existing animation?

[Mylenium]

You will likely have to rebuild it, which shouldn't be that difficult, given that it's essentially just multiple layers of Trapcode 3D stroke with lots of blur. Just wobbling up a still frame with Turbulent Displace will inevitably give a different look as the thin lines degenerate and will end up having varying thicknesses and amounts of blur. investing the effort now will no doubt also help on future projects.

Mylenium

[Matt Young]

My company won't get Trapcode 3D stroke for us.  How would you go about doing this with vanilla After Effects?

[P.M.B · Accepted solution]

Only way to do it from an image (png) would some effect that's has an option to based itself on luminance values.  Check to see if AE vanilla particle effects have a luminance option.  Also check out the free "Saber" plug-in from Video Co-Pilot.  https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2016/03/new-plug-in-saber-now-available-100-free/

[Matt Young]

That did the trick brilliantly.  Cheers for the suggestion.

[P.M.B]

Actually you may want to hold off on downloading anything from Video CP before reading this.

https://www.videocopilot.net/support/helpnotice/

[Mylenium]

Then I guess you'll have to rebuild it the hard way using tapered shape layer strokes if your company refuses to spring 50 bucks for one month of using RG plug-ins. Perfectly doable, just even more layers...

Mylenium