Making a Ring of Dots Randomly Fading Alpha...?

[Gotta Dance]

Hi Everybody,

I have to build a ring of shimmering dots. I can build the ring easily using a repeater, but I don't believe I can pass specific alpha fade timing to these repeated elements, so I've been searching all night trying to find some kind of work around to get these dots to 'shimmer' or 'fade' in and out through time. 

I can't even figure out how to do this by hand. I'm looking into attaching dots to paths, random keyframing by hand and/or possibly assigning alpha values to sine waves formulas...? 

There has to be a way to do this, right? Just to have a ring of dots all fading in and out randomly...? 

If anybody has any suggestions or history with this I'd be thrilled for any advice. Thanks for reading. 

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Fractal Noise can be scaled huge and/ or quantized to a single block with a blur. There's your Luma Matte. Conversely, simply applying a wiggly text animator to typed out dingbats could work. Otherwise a simple wiggle() can surely give you all the random-not-sorandom fades you need, but yes, of course each dot will have to be it's own entity. And from there one could naturally cook up a million custom expressions just as well.

Mylenium

[Gotta Dance]

delete

[Warren Heaton · Accepted solution]

1. Create a "• • • • • • •" Text Layer.
2. Draw a circular Ellipse on the Text Layer and set that as the Text Path.
3. Adjust the Character options, Anchor Point Grouping, the Baseline, and the Paragraph options as needed.
4. Apply an Opacity property to a Text Animator using a Wiggle Selector.

[Gotta Dance]

Hey Warren,

Yup, you got it. Exactly. If I can make letters fade then I needed to find a letter that looks like a circle. I was going to respond to Mylenium, like I figured it out! then in re-reading his message I was like...oh. That was he was saying. I'm still learning to read apparently.

I was actually coming back to the board to figure out how to get these dang dots to randomly fade without getting all twitchy. Been going crazy adjusting offsets. Your Wiggle Selector suggestion did the trick! Perfect! Thanks so much!