Shape Tool Basics in After Effects

Shapes! They're some of the cornerstones of motion graphics, and an important part of learning After Effects! Get started with the Shape Tool in this tutorial from Noble Desktop!

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Shape Layers

1. Go up to Layer > New > Shape Layer.
2. Go up to the Shape icon on the top toolbar or press Q on the keyboard to activate the Shape Tool.
3. A dropdown list of all the Shapes will appear by holding and clicking. Click on the Rectangle shape to start.

Basic Shapes

1. Click and drag on the Composition window to draw out a Rectangle. Holding down Shift will automatically constrain the shape to be a perfect square.
2. In the layer stack, toggle open Rectangle 1 and locate the Roundness property.
3. Change the value of the Roundness property to round the edges of the Rectangle. The Rounded Rectangle option is the same as the Rectangle, but with the Roundness already turned up.
4. Delete the Rectangle.
5. Activate the Ellipse tool
6. Click and drag out an Ellipse in the Composition window. Holding down Shift will constrain the shape into a perfect circle.
7. Delete the Ellipse.

Polygon and Star

1. Select the Polygon option.
2. Click and drag out a Polygon shape in the Composition window, but do not release.
3. Pressing the left and right arrows will alter the Outer Radius of the Polygon.
4. Pressing up and down arrows will change how many sides or corners the Polygon has.
5. Toggling open the Polystar 1 options will display the Corners and Outer Radius options.
6. Delete the Polygon.
7. Activate the Polystar tool.
8. Draw out a star shape in the Composition window. Repeating steps 9 and 10 will also work for the Polystar tool.
9. Toggle open Polystar 1 options.
10. Locate the Inner Radius property.
11. Change the value to alter how “thin” the arms of the star are.
12. Alter the Points value to change how many rays the star has.

Video Transcription

By the way, you might have caught on by this point, but poly star and Polygon are actually related shapes. But a star is just a polygon automatically with the settings set to a star like shape. You'll see what I mean as you go along. Outer radius, you know. How big is it? Outer roundness, how pointy is it like that?

And if you go negative, look at that, it kind of inverts and on itself. That's pretty cool. By the way, you can animate all of these. If I have a stopwatch next to them, you can animate all these properties. So I'm going to get rid of that. So I'm going to make another polygon and don't let go of your mouse button for this technique.

So I have let go. I'm still creating my polygon, but if I were to press left or right, I can control the radius of my shape. And if I press up or down on my arrow keys, I'm a number pad. I can control how many sides it has without ever letting go. Now I have a triangle, so. And finally, the start tool.

Honestly, it works the same. I'm dragging it out. I kind of looks like a flower because it's quite round. I have my settings to be quite round, but I want to point. So I'm hitting my left arrow tool to pointy and I need to, you know, more like a six pointed star. There we go. Nice mug. And David for Cronicas.

Coming up, so easy way to make some nice kind of good graphics. All right. And you know it or it could be like woosh and explosion and very, very pointy. This is basically the same as a polygon tool. Like I mentioned. You can see toggle it open and it just has, you know, all these points and has all the same properties as before.

But the difference is, is that it's starts at a polygon because a star will have another another set of properties over here in a roundness. At a roundness. See, like if I want to make it nice and round, I would get that flower shape like before it looks like it's turned SpongeBob. But yeah, that's really the main difference.

I'm actually going to drag the standard V from a selection tool. I'm going to drag the stance. You can see it better. Now let's learn how to change some of the color in the properties here. So feel color. You go up to here where it says so and you click the box next to it over there and let's make it blue.

Let's make it blue. No, let's make it white or I don't know which recolor. This is fine. Actually, I want it pink. I'm being indecisive, but I like this color scheme, so. And then. Okay, and if I want to change the stroke color, I can make that white. Now, if I want with the color picker, I can actually click the eyedropper and just pull from the background.

But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to make it white and that's fine. I'm going to hit, okay, now if I don't want to stroke or I want to make it very thin, I can control how thick it is by turning it up, turning it down like that. So it's invisible. If I want to get rid of either the filler stroke, you click the name, not the color.

You click the name and click this little strikethrough box. These other two are gradients, but I think those are getting a bit more into the nitty gritty. I'm going to hit Cancel because I want the stroke. I'm going to make it nice and sick. Oops, too thick. I'm going to now I'm going to get rid of my fill.

So I'm going to hit that strikethrough box after clicking with filename I'm going to hit. Okay. And now it's empty. Finally, I want to show you how drawing up multiple shapes without new shape layers will put them all on one layer. So check this out. I'm just going to hit two and I'm going to make a rectangle. And again, I haven't deleted this.

I haven't made a new shape layer, but I'm just drawing pretty much straight on this layer and I'm making a bunch of new shapes. And you see they all appear underneath this one layer. If I were to hit the visibility, which is this eyeball thing here, symbol, icon, they all disappear. And I can actually make them disappear each by themselves.

And every single one has its own contents, it has its own path and stroke and fill, and I can make the fill appear and disappear and all sorts of things, and I can add all sorts of effects to these. This is useful for masks, particularly effects, or if you just prefer that kind of organization. I personally prefer the animation control that comes with making new sheet layers for each, but this is very much like a matter of taste and what's best for each technique and task.

So I think, you know, as uses shapes, you'll, you'll come up with your own style of using them. So yeah, that's been shapes.