Shape Layers in After Effects

heyyou commedia families Sergey Brock Nevsky here and today I want to talk about shape layers so before we go any further I do want to talk about vectors and rasters now if you understand the difference between the two it'll make a lot more sense when you look at shapes and solids vectors are just lines and curves that's what we refer to as vectors so things like illustrator file would be a vector and also texts would be a vector it's something that you can scale and as you scale it still has the same detail it doesn't get blurry or pixelated now raster's on the other hand are things like images like jpg photoshop files so anything that it deals with pixels so raster's are made out of pixels this file right here is raster and it has 262 pixels on the X and 262 on the Y and if you have it at 100% it looks perfect it looks crisp it has that detail however if you go past 100 that's where you gambling so if I go further you can see it starts pixelating on me vectors on the other hand that's why they're so good because you can use them for logos and stuff like that it doesn't matter how big or small they are so if I scale this you can see it still maintains the detail it's still pretty sharp and it looks pretty crisp now it is important to point out that the effects you apply on a vector file and raster file have different effects and the reason why because when you apply an effect on a raster layer that effect is calculated on a buffer that matches the size of the source for example I'll show you an example I have this CC bandit so you've applied this on a raster file and if I just these points right here and if I do Bend notice when I go past the boundaries it doesn't go past it that's what I mean by that the effect is calculated on the buffer that matches the size of the source so it doesn't go past the size of the source however there is a like an effect you can use called grow bounce and you can literally grow the boundary like that so you have to put it before that effect and then you can kind of grow the influence right so you can fix it that way but on its own it doesn't go past it however that's not the case for vector files now if I do see see bend it if I apply the same thing on a vector and if I adjust these two so something like this okay and if I do Bend notice it does go past the boundaries so really that's the difference because when you apply an effect on a vector that effect is calculated only dynamic buffer that matches the size of the composition so instead of being married to the boundaries of the source it goes to the whole composition alright so now that you know more about vectors and rasters I think it's a good time for me to talk about shape layers and solids so shape layers are vectors and now you know what vectors are so that's what shape layers are and then solids are esters and now you know what rasters do and what they are so shape layers deal with lines and curves and then solids deal with pixels well the thing about solids and shape layers when you create them certain things happen for example when you create a solid it would basically treat it like an image so it's the same thing as you bring in an image into your composition or into after-effects the first thing you would do you would bring it into your project panel it would live here and then you would drag it into your composition so that's how it works well when you create a solid it basically creates a solid in your composition but it also puts it in your project panel because solids are subclass of footage source and what that means it has a source so when you even though you have it in your composition it still comes from something like a project panel so for example I'm going to create a new solid and to do that you can either right click and then go to new and then solid or you can use a keyboard shortcut ctrl Y and then you can adjust the width the height the name the color so I'm going to keep it as this 300 by 300 hit OK so now we have a solid in our composition I'm going to shift it over here notice that we have a folder now called solids and inside of this folder we have our solid right here so we've created a solid it's a subclass of a footage source and it created it in our project panel however with shape layers it's a little different now shape layers are I guess what you would say a subclass of a Av layer now I don't wanna get too technical I've heard people refer to it as static layer and what that basically means it means that it doesn't have a source and that means that it won't live in the project panel so when you create a shape layer in your composition it will live in your composition it's a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways for example like solids are great placeholders you know you can put them in your 3d scene for whatever just a placeholder and then when you're ready to replace that solid for an image you can quickly do that from project panel so you can select for example I want this image to replace the solid I would select it hold down alt on my keyboard and then drag and drop on top of this solid and when you do that it will automatically replace this solid anywhere in the composition so that is a great feature that you know solids have you can't do that with shape layers because shape layer again is is just a by itself it doesn't have a source so to create a shape layer you can select it in here or whatever it doesn't doesn't matter so I'm gonna select a rectangle and you can also draw a shape layer but rectangle for right now and you can either double click to make it full-size of your composition or you can just draw like this right and then you can go in here and adjust the size of it let's do the same size so 300 by 300 that's good so pretty simple and you can see side by side these two are identical you can't really tell the difference which ones which unless you look over here so you can see that's a shape layer and that's a raster shape layer is not you know it doesn't have a source so you can't really replace anything you know it won't allow you so that is a limitation however it's the same thing as vectors you know this is vector so if you do bend it and if you set it up the way we did it before and if you bend you can see goes past the boundaries of your source however that's not the case for the solid so if you do the same thing again adjusted and if you bend you can see it doesn't let's talk about parametric and busier shape outs so weird our thing so parametric shapes are these shapes right here so any of these are parametric shapes for example I'm gonna select start tool and I'm gonna draw me a start so this star is a parametric shape I can go into inside of this start and play with these parameters like star polygons so now it's gonna give me a polygon go back to star I can play with the amount of points I want or I can play with the inner radius extend that a bit out of radius so you get the idea all of these are awesome like inner around this you can adjust around this and then out around this so this is definitely powerful and it gives you the ability to quickly get the shape that you want you can keyframe this for example inner radius something like that right you can keyframe and get something interesting here right so it's definitely useful and it's pretty accurate however if you want to select vertices you can't really do that that's where you would have to convert to Bezier but these things are pretty accurate for example we love parametric rectangle for example I'm going to go over here and select this rectangle tool and I'm actually going to double click and I'm gonna go inside of this rectangle path we have this size now this size is super awesome because it's very accurate and I do like accuracy because I can use that in my expressions in other words I can't use the scale property right this scale it just goes from 0 to 100 it doesn't give me the you know the exact size of this shape now this one does for example my composition is 1920 by 1080 if I press ctrl K you can see that's what I get 1920 by 1080 and right now this shape is the exact same size as my composition so it's 1920 by 1080 so it's accurate on pixels so you followin something 500 pixels by 500 pixels it gives me the exact shapes you can do that with solids but you have to constantly adjust you don't have a live option like you do here in other words you can't really attach you can't really change it in your timeline like that with solids you can with shape layers and the cool thing about this you can actually use expressions so for example I'm going to press ctrl T and bring up a text and I'm going to type let's do you car media.com and I'm going to select it do ctrl alt home to Center the pivot point control home to Center the text and now I can sell for this shape to be the exact same size as my text all I have to do just alt click on a stopwatch for this size property and in here I can say X you're gonna be and then I'm going to pick pick web to this you care Mediacom text and I'll tell it to be the source rect it's time that's a method and then I'll tell it to be the width so basically I'm saying X you're going to be the width of this text and then I'm going to copy this control C and then control V and paste replace Y and instead of width we're gonna do height okay and then underneath here we're gonna define this so we're gonna say X Y in other words X is going to be this value and why it's going to be that value so put the width of my text here and the height of my text there so when I click away now you can see it's perfect so whatever I type in here like you Kragh media.com so it gives me exactly what I want and that's what parametric shape does it gives you the exact size that you want so that's parametric shape but let's kind of segue into busier shapes so what are those I already mentioned it that busier shapes give you kind of more options as far as moving vertices and stuff like that so I can convert and I'm gonna get rid of all this like a parametric shape into a Bezier shape so I can select let's do a star right I can draw a star it's a parametric shape I can play around with all these parameters and get what I want and then I can just right click here and say convert to Bezier path and when you do that then all those options go away and you no longer have the ability to control those options obviously you lose it and you can't really go back but you can control like the vertices and stuff like that you can't control that and you can keyframe that stuff so you would eat you can easily I guess go over here and select these and kind of move them around and keyframe them so I'll go from this to that I know a lot of people ask me is like how do you separate the two vertices for example like yeah I can't really disconnect I want to keep going I can't really do that but you can you know you you just have to select the two vertices that you want for example these two and then you would have to go to a layer where actually you can just right click here and go to mask and shape path and where's this closed just uncheck that and now those are separated and you can just select one press G to bring up the pencil and you can keep drawing so that's nice so you can also draw a busier shape using the pencil so G you know may click on that icon here and then you can draw whatever you want however sometimes I know people struggle with that one as well when you draw this you have all of this and you can't really you don't have those handles to control right you because this one is what it's called roto Bezier and that can mess people up if you didn't unchecked this in the beginning you think you're you're done like for example I'm gonna get rid of this again right now I have a checked and that roto busier is checked and it gives me interesting look here it gives me an entirely different kind of experience but if I have this checkbox unchecked now all of a sudden right it doesn't make it against around automatically now you have to draw your own kind of shape with all these handles and stuff like that so that's nice but what if you want to go back to wrote a Bezier how would you do that and the same thing just select your path and then right-click and go to mask and shape paths and select this row to Bezier and when you do that it's gonna do you know it's gonna go back to this order Bezier now you can still adjust like the sharpness of your points all you have to do make sure you have your pencil selected and then you can hold alt and then click and drag and you can kind of make it more round or you can make it more sharp the same thing for that you can make it sharp by just scrolling left and right or up and down whatever it is or you can just click on it like that it will automatically make them sharp let's talk about fill and Stroke so when you create a shape layer in After Effects it automatically comes with three things a path stroke and fill now I can quickly prove this to you you can control things in here quickly whatever you want so you have a fill stroke and then you can select a shape that you want so I'm going to do rectangle tool create really quick and then after you created it you have all these options so if I go over here you can see that we have path stroke and fill so it comes with three things path by itself is just path if I turn this fill off you can see it's just a path it doesn't matter what I do to it if I make the corners rounded or if I scale it up or down if I let go you can see that I can't see anything because it's just a path it doesn't have anything if you hit render you won't see anything however that's why we have this fill right here we can turn this on and now we have a fill and now we can see our path and we can also turn on the stroke and then we can see the stroke now we can adjust options for the stroke in here and the same for the fill but we can also quickly adjust the same elements in here as long as you select your layer you can adjust it in here as well so for example I can go to this fill I can click on it and now I can turn off the fill entirely and just see the stroke which is good I can just go to a solid so a solid color I can go and make it linear gradient and also radial gradients so I'm going to keep it at linear for right now hit OK and if you have your move tool selected press the V on your keyboard you can actually visually adjust your gradient linear gradient and the same thing goes for radio right that would be the center and then you can extend it so that's super awesome and you can actually add colors in there you can click on this solid and you can keep it as this or you can change the colors maybe something like that you can insert colors by clicking on it and you can create something different and so on so the sky is the limit what you can do with this you can go back to linear and do all kinds of stuff now the same thing applies for stroke you can click on it here you can make it solid or linear gradient radial and so on so you get the idea you can change the color of it in here let's do something like red actually let's keep it white and then we can also adjust the size of it now the same options we have there we also have here like I said and I'm actually gonna go to stroke here and stroke has more options than you see up there for example obviously we can control the size of it but we can also control the line cap and join now to do that we're actually gonna collapse this down so I'm going to convert it to busier path so now it's not a parametric shape and we just see our vertices we can select them move them around I can select another one shift select and then right-click and go to mask and shape path and make it open so now we have an opening here and in fact I'm going to need a sharper edge so I'm gonna make this sharp okay so for this example I'm gonna show you these two properties what they do so right now this line cap really if I change it from buts to around notice it makes it round on the edges which is awesome now look at this this one is pretty sharp but if I go to this line join and if I make that one round you can see it rounds it up as well so it definitely has more control there as well we can adjust the size and play around with dashes so I can say plus right here and then I can create dashes so if I move on this slider we can create big ones like long ones or shorter ones and then we can also offset these so these can be very useful for animation you can do like a time expression so you can all click here and just say time times let's do like 100 it might be a little fast let's see and you can see that it's moving the great thing about stroke in parametric shapes is that it doesn't matter the size of your pen metric shape the stroke size stays the same for example if I go to the size of my pen metric shape and if I increase it it doesn't matter how big the shape gets the size of the stroke is still the same however that's not the case for the scale property of my lair so if I take this down to 50 by 50 and if I increase the scale property of it you can see that the stroke size increases so you definitely want to play around with only the size of your parametric shape now there's a new feature that After Effects added that's basically centers the anchor point when you create a new shape layer in your composition for example I'm going to select one of these shape tools like rectangle tool and when I draw one in my composition like this you can see that the anchor point by default is in the center of my composition however you can always use like a shortcut ctrl alt home right if you do that it centers the anchor points to your shape but there's even better option all you have to do is just go to your preferences ctrl alt and then semicolon or you can also you can also go here by edits and then preferences and in general so in here you have an option called center anchor points in new shape layers so when you have that checked and you press ok so let me undo all of this and now I'm going to create a new shape so watch this so I want to create one you can see that it automatically centers the anchor points to my shape which is super awesome let's talk about what I call advanced masking so for this I'm going to create a new shape any of these would work but I'm gonna go with rectangle just create a new shape and I'm going to convert it to busy air path so now we have that shape and next what I'm gonna do I'm gonna actually draw a mask on top of my shape layer now I'm still surprised that many people still don't know that you can draw masks on top of a shape layer the only thing you have to do you have to choose obviously if you want to do like a shape or a pencil and then after that you have to go over here and make sure that it's not on this icon and it's on this tool creates mask our icon so you so like this and then you can draw any kind of mask that you want something like this is good in fact I'm going to press M do you hear the Thunder it's storming pretty bad here so I'm gonna change the color red so you can see better so that's the mask alright now I don't know if you've been there but I have - where you created something and you mask something out and went past your solid or your shape and you kind of wish like hey that would have been great if I can extend it somehow without going through all kinds of problems well you can all you have to do just go to your mask and select this mask path and then do ctrl C to copy it wow it's storming bad I don't know if you hear this and then do ctrl C to copy it and then go to shape and then go to rectangle and then path and then select this and you ctrl V to paste and now you can actually get rid of your mask you can see that I've pasted it right on top of your mask and now instead of it being a mask is actually a shape the awesome thing about after fax is that it allows us to convert text and vector layers into shape layers and let me show you what I'm talking about for this example I have text and vector logo so I'm gonna select this text right click and go to create and then click on this creates shapes from text when you do that it's gonna create a shape layer right above of our text it hides this text and then all of that is shape layer so you can zoom in you can go inside of it here you can select vertices and do all kinds of stuff so for example you can move things around you can get rid of them and who knows what you want to do I mean you can I don't know adjust things and create something interesting so you can do that in seconds you can do the same thing for the vector layers as well you can right click on it and then go to create and then create shapes from vector layer so when you do that again the same thing it creates a shape layer right above our vector layer and then you can go and double click and adjust things in here as well so you can select these vertices you can move on things and the sky is the limit the awesome thing about shape layers is that you can move paths from After Effects into illustrator and then altered their do whatever you know use whatever tools you have in illustrator and then after you're done you can import it into After Effects without ever like exporting anything out of After Effects so let me show you what I'm talking about here so I'm gonna press ctrl T to bring up the type tool and I'm just gonna type letter U and then I'm going to press control enter to get out of edit mode and I'm gonna move this over here and next I'm going to convert this into a shape so I'm gonna go to create and then create shapes from text so now we have a shape layer so I'm going to go inside here and I'm gonna select the path of this u so I have it selected ctrl C to copy it and now I'm gonna go to illustrator so in here I'm gonna pasted control V and now we have our U shape in here so I'm going to give it a collar real quick so we can see things much better and next we're gonna do I'm gonna select these four vertices and I'm just going to adjust the roundness like this that's all I'm going to do and after I'm done I'm going to select all of them and do ctrl C to copy it and then I'm gonna go back to after-effects and then select the path again and do ctrl V to paste and so now you can see that we quickly took something out of After Effects brought into illustrator and altered it using illustrator tools and we brought it back in no time let's talk about working with multiple shapes and to be honest with you I feel like this subject right here is where a lot of people struggle with so I'm gonna try to camp here and kind of like shine a light on some stuff so I'm gonna create a new shape and I'm gonna do it differently just to show you another way of doing it so I'm gonna right click over here on our timeline new and then new shape layer so click here and right away it creates this little dot right here so it doesn't have anything it's like a blank shell right it's just a shape layer with nothing in it so no contents nothing and then you like kind of dress it up so then you can go to add and you can see all these options it's the same thing you see here so I'm gonna click here and then you get to pick the first thing we're gonna do is just the path so we can do rectangle ellipse poly star and path so path is where you draw the shape you want so I'm gonna go with rectangle and right away you can see it created a rectangle but it's a path so it doesn't have anything it's blank so next we have to do again remember the three things path and then fill and Stroke so we're gonna get to fill next so let's add a fill to this so then I'm gonna go to add again and now we're gonna move up to the second stage here or I guess third at this point so let's go and add fill so when you do that it creates a fill so now we have a fill we can play with the size roundness all of that stuff so we can see what we're actually doing and we can actually render this and we can see it alright so next let's go to add again and let's add stroke so now we have stroke we can adjust the size of it here and again the same stuff you can do here as well I just want to show you that you can do it other ways and obviously next one we want to do is group this so we can either select the first one hold shift and select the last one and then do ctrl G and group it that way or you can create an empty group you can just go again the same thing add and then go to group empty and it creates like an empty one right here you can put it at the top select the other three and then drop it in there and then you can select it press enter you can rename it to rect angle and there you have it so essentially it's the same thing as our selecting one of these like this rectangle and drawing it and as you can see obviously you want to make sure you select you know the same layer here when you draw it you can see it creates the same one and it has all of these options in here so the same thing we could just create it it creates it for you like this is what we created and that's what we created for us so it's identical the same thing but obviously you have more control you can kind of choose what you want you don't even need to have stroke if you don't want to you can completely get rid of it so now that you know how to create it from scratch so let's move this around so I'm going to select this one move it over here let's create more so right now we created already two shapes in one shape layer and I know at this point a lot of people get confused because like you have a layer and then you have shapes within that layer so just think of it this way it's kind of like grouping right you have this one layer it holds two of them at this point right now and then this one it has its own shape and then you can go inside and it has its own transform properties scale everything that the layer has so think of it just another layer within this layer it's got a nice because it kind of helps you to clean the clutter in your timeline so then the same thing for this you know the same stuff it has its own stroke fill transform properties so really you just select this and then you can go into each one of them and control it individually right you can change the color and you know the size of the stroke and all of that so you can add more you can select this and hit G to reveal the pencil or you can click on this icon and you can draw something else there's something different all right so we have another shape again it created this shape so again we can go into it right and then we can change the color of it and let's do another one let's draw quite a few actually so I'm going to draw something like this let's draw another one like a triangle let's flatten these okay so let's do something like this basically I'm just drawing random stuff and again the same thing here we can double click here and select each one we can change the colors now the way this works so if you want to select the shape layer you click once and you select the shape layer so we are on top of the shape layer now if you want to go deep into each shape layer in here within the shape layer you would just double click and now you're at the other stage so now you can select all of these however it gets even more complicated for example I'm going to select all of these and I'm gonna move them up here so they're at the very top okay then I can group them so I can do ctrl G now encrypt them so now we have the first stop in the very top shape layer and then if we double click we get to this stage so in this stage we have these individual ones and then we also have a group so when I select this I can't select individual like individual elements within this group because we're at this stage so to go into the group we have to double click and now we can select things within the group so even if I am in this group and let's say I select both of these and I group them again ctrl G right so now let's start the View tab so first I click on the shape so we're at the very top shape layer I just want to show you how you access the you know the hierarchy of things how you access shapes within a shape layer so right now we're at the very top we're at the very you know the root of the shape there then we double click now we're at this stage right we can select individual ones and the group one then we can go inside of that group that's another stage right the hierarchy of things you can double click and now we can select these two individual because they're not grouped now this one is grouped so we're there now I can double click there and to go into that so I can select all of them but at this point we're at the very bottom of the chain and when we're at the bottom of the chain we can still select all the other shapes but for example if I select this shape I automatically get to that level and now this one is a group if I click on this one I automatically get up to that level and then that is a whole group thing so you kind of have to learn that you're moving up and down the chain I know it's confusing but it will make sense as you do this daily so for example if I want to select vertices of these I'd just double click now I'm in this group right I'll double click and then I can select individual ones so at this point once I have the selected individual shape I can just click on add vertices and then and then I can move it around if it's a path and not parametric shape like these let's talk about shape attributes or shape operations whatever you call it but this one is definitely my favorite and for this example I have a shape layer that I took the tax and basically converted to shapes and as you can see each letter is a shape so it's all like a group so it's important that you know this so let's talk about shape operations and by the way before we do that so we about the group mg we talked about the paths we talked about the fill the stroke the gradients so we we've covered all of this now we're going to talk about operations or shape attributes again whatever you want to call it so if these are easy and pretty simple like to use you you get it right away you know what a repeater is and stuff like that so I'm not going to go over every single operation but I will show you how they work so for example I'm gonna use this first one let's do offset paths so I'm gonna select this content go ads and then offset paths and so when you do that what it does it drops it at the very bottom and as you can see all of these shapes are affected by it so we can go over here and we can kind of adjust right the offset and so the important thing to point out here is that whatever you have above this operation that's what's going to be affected by it so if you move it let's say just one shape you can see that a is ignored if you put it in between media and you Kerra you can see that everything above that which is heuchera is affected and then everything below is ignored so that's really consistent with all the other operations so it's important that you know that so that alone is huge okay so let's say you wanted to apply this to only letter R now you can put it right below it and it will get it however it will also get the other shapes so what you want to do is put it inside of this group like this and then it only affects the letter R so that's pretty simple now let's talk about some other ones so let's do let's see let's do repeater again make sure you select the content to go to repeater and now drops at the very bottom so I'm going to zoom out a little bit and let's go to repeater transform properties and let's move it let's move this to the left a little bit like that okay so that's good you can see it repeated it and it's exactly what I'm going for but again the exact same thing it repeated everything above it so if I put this in between media and you Kragh you can see it only affects you Kura and not media you can also put it and just R and it will only do it for the R or if you do it for let's say II it will do only for that letter e so you get the idea here I'm just trying to I know I'm being repetitive here no pun intended but anyway so let's go over another one so let's go to ad and then let's try twist again make sure you select the content I know if you don't if you just select this it's gonna drop it inside there and things get complicated so so like that go to add and then go to what did I say twist so now we can twist we can do all of that stuff it affects everything however if you put it in between media and you cram then it only affects you kura and so on so you get the concept you kind of you can play around with all of them but the other two that I really want to go over would be merge paths and trim paths so for that I'm going to create something different so I'm gonna create a new shape so I'm gonna select let's do rectangle and let's do a star so something like this and notice they're over the top of each other and they're right here so what if I wanted to use this star right here and cut out a hole in this rectangle the shape of the star so how would I do that and obviously this is where you would use this merge path so again make sure you select contents go to add and then select this merge paths so when you do that it's gonna drop it right underneath those two and automatically you can see it created a new fill so this is how basically it ignores all the other colors you had and you have to create a new one right so a pink one this time but if I turn this off nothing happening so this merge path is right underneath it so again it's gonna affect everything above and the way it works it basically takes this one and it cuts whatever is above it so right now rectangle is going to cut but I want the star to be the cutting shape so it's gonna cut the this rectangle so what I'm gonna go I'm gonna go to this merge pass and then instead of add I'm gonna do subtract so because you can see it subtracts this star shape from the rectangle which is exactly what I want then I can do intersect and it intersect and then I can do exclude intersections something like that so you get the idea here so it's pretty simple again the same concept whatever is above is gonna be affected now watch what happens when it add more shapes so for example I'm gonna do let's do a circle so I'm gonna add a big circle here and instead of let's just subtract okay so now notice the the star and the rectangle both are cutting the circle so whatever shapes you have however many you have they're all gonna cut the very last or first one whatever you however you look at it that's what's gonna be cut now another one I want to talk about let me get rid of all of this I'm gonna draw let's do a circle okay and I'm gonna add let's go to fill and let's add a stroke so we have a stroke so the other one here just one shape nothing complicated so we can go to add and then creates or add this where is that shrimp paths so this one is my favorite I use it all the time and I guess you can keep it there if you want to but what it does it basically trims your path and again the same concept is going to affect whatever is above you can either have it here or you can get it out of that group and put it underneath here and then I'll do the exact same thing again if these operations are very easy to use but you just have to understand how they work and I think by watching this definitely clear things out for you so definitely try all of them and see what you can do with them let's talk about converting points into nulls now it's one of the newest features of After Effects and I find it super useful and really now you can have access to the points using expressions and I'm not going to touch on expression side of things but I will introduce it to a script that is very useful so for this example you want to make sure you have that script up I already have it in here but you can go to window and then click on this create nulls from paths at the very bottom so once you have that you'll have something like this you'll have three buttons and first let's create some kind of shape I'm gonna press G to get the pen tool you can click on that and then let's create something like this so again very simple we have four points now what I want to do I want to convert these points into nulls so that I can control them outside of this path in my time line so to do that I'm going to press ctrl and then click on the strangle to collapse all my properties and select this property path property hit s twice to solo it and then while you have your properties selected we're gonna play with these options in here so the first one is points follow nulls so when you click on this right away you see nulls created right above the shape layer and these nodes actually control the the shape itself so you can click on one of them and then move them and as you can see it moves the shape which is super awesome the same thing for all the other ones as well so now you can animate them in your timeline and create some interesting animations so I'm gonna undo all of this and let's explore some more so I'm gonna select this path again so it is important that you selected and then we're gonna go to the second one nulls follow points so when you click on that again it's gonna do the exact same thing it's gonna create notes right above your shape layer and these nulls are attached to your points but the thing is you can't really select the null and move it now the only way you'll move if you select one of these points so if you select one point and move it in here notice that no moved with it now that comes in handy for a lot of things for example you can press ctrl T and bring in some kind of text like you current media okay and then what you can do just parent to one of these nulls so shift parents to one of these so now it's snap to that null and I'm gonna zoom out a little bit so now if I go into the shape where I select the path and I can control like this point right here so when I move it you can see that this text moves with the point which is huge you can animate the points and then you can attach things to it let's explore the very last one which is let's do trace paths so that one so again make sure the path is selected click on this trace path and this time you have a null that kind of traces your or your path around this shape it can be very useful for a lot of things so you can again create the text you can say something like your emedia and then you can shift parents who No and now it'll move with it now the last thing I want to talk about is a script called smart rect now it is a script that I developed with the help of my friend Tim CSUN this script is super helpful if you work with shape layers now the reason why I created it because I saw the need for it and so let me show you what it does so before I show you the script I kind of want to talk about the challenges that I face and why I created it so if you use shape layers and after facts for example rectangle tool and if you create it right you have a rectangle tool it has some cool options but to get to the size you're gonna have to hike down and you know you can adjust it but they're all kind of on the same property so you have to separate things and you can still do with the expression so there's you know obviously it's not a problem however the other problem that I had you it only extrudes from the center right the the rectangle extrude from the center and that can be a bit problematic again an expression can fix it and I've done it before but it's just a lot of work to get to that point so I saw these challenges and I got tired of it so I created this script called smart rect and it is right here just literally one button that's all it is and if you click on it it creates a shape and in the effects control panel right here you can have all of these options in here and you can adjust the excise the Y size and also the roundness the skew so you get the idea now really my favorite feature is this anchor point and right now it's set to bottom-left so this anchor is at the bottom left and because of that it's extruding you can see from the left going to the right and then from the bottom going upwards like this so that's pretty cool but instantly you can go here and select any other points in here so you can say let's go to top left and then it's going to go to the top left and then you can extrude again to the right from that anchor point and then downwards so again you can go Center and can do the same thing Center again I'm doing this quickly on the fly and you can do bottom Center so now it's at the bottom Center now it's extruding from the center and then upwards so these options are super useful and you can create things on the fly however that's not the end of it you can also do the following so I'm gonna get rid of this and what if I have like a text or an image footage in this case I'm just gonna use a text so I'm going to press ctrl T and I'm gonna type let's do you Quran media.com and let's do ctrl alt home to Center the pivot point you do have to Center the pivot point and then ctrl home to centered in the composition so now that I have it in my composition like this obviously I don't have to Center it I can put it anywhere and then what I have to do all I gotta do is just go to the smart rect and press on this button and it will create a shape based on my text here which is super awesome and now I can quickly adjust like this and it's great you can also bring in images for example and see if I have something here I do have let's do this Uecker media so I have an image I can press on it and you can see it does the exact same thing you can go over here and kind of extrude things so it works on pretty much everything and you can get something that you need quickly and I've used it for lower thirds I've used it for a lot of things so if you're in a business of working with shape layers I highly recommend to smart rect and you can get it at Yuka Mediacom / smart rect alright thank you so much for watching this tutorial I really hope you found it useful and normally by this point what I say is this like our video share it subscribe to our youtube channel follow us on social media and again all that is great and you should still probably do that however what would benefit us even more if you subscribe to our mailing list that's right it's something you'll see at the bottom of this video or somewhere on the page you'll see an option to where you can subscribe to our mailing list and what that does it gives us an opportunity to reach you with any kind of content that we post whether it's podcasts or really anything that we're doing with YouTube you'll only get notified when we create a tutorial however that's not all we do we do a lot more and on Facebook it's tough you know we worked really hard to generate the following but when you post it only reaches the people you know a certain amount of people and then you have to pay to reach the rest of your followers which is so odd and by you subscribing to our mailing list you would actually give us power to reach everybody and so that's what we really would like for you to do so if you don't mind subscribe to our mailing list and we promise you will not spam you unless you think spamming you would be you know notifying you off the stuff that we're doing if you think that's spam then yeah well we'll stem you but other than that we want and until next time my name is Sergey appraoch Nevsky and this is you chrome Mediacom [Music] you [Music]

Channel: ukramedia

Views: 31,564

Keywords: shape layers, solids, shapes, vectors, rasters, after, effects, after effects, adobe, adobe after effects, tutorial, lesson, shape layers in after effects, ukramedia, ukramedia.com, sergei prokhnevskiy, how to use shape layers, bezier, rotobezier, parametric, marametric shape, solid layer, shape attributes, shape operations, paths, path, merge paths, repeater, offset paths, trim paths, twist, fill, stroke, gradient, linear gradient, radial gradient, using shape layers, how to, masking

Id: D7hE46t8Vm0

Length: 42min 51sec (2571 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018