Mikey Borup shows how you can modify the wiggle expression to create a wave effect.

Has the wiggle expression been done to death? I’d say no. Wiggle is likely the first expression that everyone learns in After Effects and why not. It’s a super useful one. Wiggle has a bunch of other parameters that people tend to overlook. In this new tutorial from Mikey Borup, you can learn how to use wiggles to create a wave effect in Ae.

Mikey shows how to work with the random seed layer, and link multiple wiggle expressions from numerous layers together to create a wave effect. The key is to input a random seed value based on the position of a layer in the scene. Linking wiggles like this is an easy way to create a wave system, or something similar to noise.