Shape Up: Define Shapes and Anchors Before Adding them to a Comp

Lars Jandel’s ShapeUp Lets You Choose Shapes and Place Anchors Before Committing them to Composition in After Effects

A new After Effects tool works as a construction kit for working with standard shapes. ShapeUp lets you define shapes BEFORE you actually create the shape layers. The tool creates “clean” shapes as an After Effects’ native parametric shape or ones that use a custom path.

ShapeUp allows you to set pretty much all aspects of your shape before it is even created. This includes colors and stroke settings, anchor point positions, rounding and more. ShapeUp’s preview displays the defined shape in relation to your active composition to give you an idea about size, position, colors.

Shape Up Offers:

  • Preview your shape & composition
  • Five shape families to choose from: ellipse, rectangle, horizontal lines, vertical lines, polygons + stars
  • 5-6 sub shapes each
  • Quickly set the anchor position and alignment to your comp within the preview
  • Create shapes at the top/bottom of your layer stack or above/below a selected layer
  • Set size, position, stroke width, rounding, amount of copies and points, inner width, inner rounding for polygons/stars
  • Input fields: Use tokens to utilize the comp size, alignment, position of selected layers, grid spacing
  • Toggle stroke & fill on/off
  • Set colors

Learn more about Shape Up and how it can help you with your shapes and animation workflow in After Effects.