Mikey Borup Shows How to Write an Expression That Can Automatically Scale Strokes With the Layer.

Shap Layer and Layer Styles in After Effects are boundlessly powerful once you rein in some of the “gotcha’s.” One such stumbling block is with layer styles. When you have a stroke on a layer, and you scale the layer, the stroke doesn’t scale at all. That is because the stroke is independent of the layer that it is on and the transformational data doesn’t get passed down. You can fix this pretty quickly with a little expression.

Mike Borup’s new quick tip shows off how to write a small expression in After Effects that will automatically scale the stroke along with the layer. The scale is a standard issue in Ae. So much so that motion graphics artist Lars Jandel created basic shapes preset with one of the features being that the stroke is in sync with layer scale.