I’ll be honest. I can’t fully explain what a Lorenz System is. In fact I can’t even partially explain what it is. If you stumbled on my post trying to learn more about it, here’s what I believe is a helpful explanation. An upside to getting a journalism degree was not having to take calculus. If you get it and can explain it to me in a single sentence please do so in the comments.

For the purposes of this post we won’t need to understand the physics or math. We only need to agree that the system looks beautiful and elegant and is just begging to be animated.

After Effects plugin designer Zaebects, creator of Modulation, has a simple script called Lorenz System that imports a Lorenz System into a composition as a shape layer.

From there you can duplicate the system, leaving one copy as the base layer. With the duplicates you can manipulate the stoke using trim paths and the stroke dashes options to create points along the system and have those points or lines follow the path of the system.

It’s a fairly easy process for something that looks very complicated. My example above is my first attempt. I’m sure I’ll revisit this at some point.

I exported out the animation as an animated SVG using Bodymovin.