After Effects Freedom – Shapes With the Pen Tool

You can do so much with the pen tool and it is one of those tools that can behave quite differently, if you hold your mouth right. So be and sure and hold your mouth right!

Seriously, there are a few things, a few settings that will make using the pen tool behave differently, present different controls to you, but once you get a handle on them, (yes that was a cheesy After Effects pun), you will appreciate the flexibility and control they afford. Like all our shapes and drawing tools, the best way to learn is by doing so hopefully your After Effects is open and ready to go.

When you create a new composition, all you need to do to begin creating shapes with the pen tool is select it and begin drawing. The usual ‘right click’, ‘create new layer’ in the source layer area of your time panel is not necessary. Drawing with the pen tool creates your shape layer. The pen tool is the easiest and most difficult drawing tool because the display states, it’s behavior, the number of clicks it takes to ‘get there’ can be a bit frustrating until you have this under your belt. I am also certain there are times when a ‘double click’ doesn’t take it to the transform state you expect it too so recognizing the indicators and accompanying behavior will help you keep your hair.

Let’s start drawing with the pen tool. Choose pen, choose a color and stroke thickness you like and begin applying points. The first thing you see is that you are doing more than drawing a curvy line. As you apply your points, you see that the shape is being completed for you. Color appears, filling your shape between the first and last points you’ve entered. Hmmmm. Is this what you wanted? Maybe, but if you want to simply draw a curvy line, click on ‘Fill’ on the right of the tool bar ( the word ‘Fill’ not the Fill color icon ), and click it off, click the fill icon with the red slash through it. Now begin drawing again applying points with your pen tool and you see something much closer to your curvy line.

As you apply your points, straight lines appear between your points. What if you want a little ‘curveyness’ in your line? What if you want to draw a coil or an ‘S’ curve? As you apply your points, before releasing your mouse, move it a bit, drag it in the direction you want to apply a curve and you will see Bezier handles appear. This lets you apply some curvature to your line and with the ‘handles’, when you go back to edit, it will present these same handles that will allow you to adjust the form applying curvature as you pull the handles away from your line.

With your line drawn, you will always want to go back and do ‘something’. How do you select it and what are you selecting? You’ve drawn a complete shape, your shape is made up of lines, curves, and connecting points, and you will want to adjust all of those and any of them individually at times.

At the simplest point level, you can click and move a previous point. With your shape drawn, if you double click on it, you will see the shape described with a rectangle with dotted sides and you will also see the ‘dots’ you created to construct it. The dots are clear rectangles. If you click on one, it becomes solid, you know that is the dot you will be changing and you simply move it around. If you point had a curve applied with it, you will see the handles that allow you to adjust the curvature approaching and leaving this point as well as moving the point. Too many points? Need to add another one? If you click on your pen tool again, using the shortcut key ‘G’ walks through the pen edits options: enter once, you will see a plus sign appear next to your pen icon indicating that you will add a new point with a ‘click’, enter ‘g’ again, you will see a minus sign next to your pen icon. This means you will delete a point if you click on it. Enter ‘g’ again and it your pen becomes a vertex tool but what’s different is if you click on a point it will receive Bezier handles, a point that simply connected 2 lines will now be a control point for curvature. A lot of little things that beg for a little experimentation to get comfy and begin to get the images you want.

You know a layer has transform attributes and when you draw these shapes, you can have multiple shapes on the same layer. You may overlay a star with an ellipse or enclose your curved line within a bounding box for a logo. Once you begin developing your layer the process of choosing your shapes and exactly what you’re choosing deserves some attention.

My favorite test shape is a curved line because of it’s simplicity and because it has multiple points which makes it easy to illustrate and experiment with these ‘choosing rules’. Clicking on the pointer on the far left of the tool bar takes you out of drawing mode. Entering ‘F2’ will also deselect any shape you’ve been drawing. Click once on your curved line. When you do this, you have chosen the whole shape layer. If you chose it and began moving it around, you would the transform properties of the shape layer changing.

Click twice on your curved line, and you will choose the line, not the entire layer. You will see it outlined by a rectangle connected with dotted lines. You can adjust this shape, your curved line independently from other shapes on the layer and you will the Transform: Shape values adjusted when you do. In this same mode you can click and adjust the points that make up your shape, our curve in this example. If you double click again, while you are in this shape selection mode, you will enter the free transform mode. Here you can use the free transform tool much like in Photoshop, you can rotate, size, skew, and ‘flip it’ on it’s axis, vertically or horizontally. These movements aren’t recorded in any of your transformation values and this drove me nuts for a while however you can animate these adjustments. Simply enter the stopwatch the Path attribute, move your time indicator down the timeline, your make your changes in free transform mode, click by Path to enter a new keyframe, enter home and preview to see the animation created with your free transform adjustments.

You have very flexible tools to create practically any shape you can imagine with freedom or dependency that serves your greater design but like most of the special features, multiple displays, and fine tuning, a little experimentation goes a long way.