ShapeRig – Tutorial

Thanks for downloading Shape Rig. This is a tool that we built to make working with paths in After Effects as simple and as powerful as possible. Personally, this has become one of my favorite tools, and I've found that we use it all the time. For things from characters, to 3D looking things, to those things where you want to blur the lines between 2D and 3D, we're really excited to share it with you and to see what you create with it. Shape Rig is essentially our own version of creating elsewhere paths, but we've simplified a bunch of things and added a bunch of extra cool features. Here is how you use Shape Rig. If you have nothing selected in a comp, you can go ahead and run the script via KBAR. What that's going to do is build us a path, and there's four nulls, and those nulls control the points in the path. If you want to add any points to the path, all you have to do is duplicate the nulls, and those are going to get added into the path. Then to add curves to the points, you just scale the nulls and rotate them. You can think of it like there's invisible bezier handles that are parented to these nulls, and when the scale of those nulls is at 100%, the point is linear. Then as you scale the null up, those handles are going to stretch out, and as you rotate it, those will move as well. You can unlink the scale and scale on x and y to adjust the in and out tangents of those points individually. You'll notice on these nulls as well that there's an effect applied. It's going to have two options. Active lets you keyframe whether or not the point is part of the path, and then always linear is just going to keep that point linear no matter how the null is scaled or rotated. Then on the path itself, there's an option to have the path closed or not, and then there's also a round path option, which is going to be similar to the round corners on a shape layer. Just note that if you have the always linear option checked on these points, then it is going to apply if the path is rounded as well. A second way that you can use this is to draw a path connecting selected layers based on the order that you select those layers. If I select from 1 to 8 here and then run the script, I'm going to get a path that goes all the way through those layers in the order I selected them. If I select 6, 3, 8, and 5, then the first layer I select will be the first point, and the second will be the second, et cetera, et cetera. Then lastly, you can convert a path that you already have, maybe you brought in from Overlord or you just drew it, you can convert that directly to a shape rig by selecting the path and then running the script, and then it's going to put all the nulls in all the right places and scale and rotate them, and then you can go about editing the path as you like. This expression does work with nulls that are in 3D space, so here I've got a similar path with the nulls all just kind of spread out in Z. You can see as I move the camera, you get some parallax between the points, which can work well for faking 3D stuff. So something else I wanted to cover is what happens if you've got a path where the handles of a point are broken and the angles aren't linked like this. So if I go ahead and convert this path directly to a shape rig, you're going to see that it actually adds a second null at that point so that you can scale and rotate those points independently from each other. So a little bit about how that works. The out tangent null, which is going to by default be this cyan color, is going to be position linked to the intangent one, so it'll be basically parented, and if you want to rejoin the points, you can select both those layers and then holding command, click the shape rig button, and it's just going to collapse them back into one, and then you can do the same thing to break them again if you want. You can select a null, command click, and then it's going to make a copy of it that's linked so that you can do that if you need. So I just wanted to give a basic explanation for kind of the logic behind the expression that drives all this, not necessarily because you need to know it, but personally for me, I find if I understand how something works, then I can make it do more cool things. So the expression is looking at every single layer in the composition from layer one to layer however many layers there are, and it is checking to see which layers have been marked as being part of the path, and the way that they're marked is by a specific group of characters in the layer name, and the place that those characters are determined is in the group that the path lives in. So if you look here, you can see there's at the beginning of the group name, bracket, SR1, bracket, and you'll also see that all these layers have those exact same characters in the layer name. So if I delete that out of there, you'll see this point is now no longer part of this path. So of course you could rename this if you want, you could name it tag, and now nothing is part of the path, and then if I were to rename one of these so it has that group of characters and then start duplicating the points again, you get the same thing. And like I said, the expression is looking at the layers from top to bottom to determine the order in which the points are drawn in the path, so if you rearrange the order of the layers, then it will rearrange the order of the points accordingly. So to push this whole concept of tagging a little bit farther, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this path group here, and I'm going to rename the tag to have a 2 instead of a 1. And then on one of these nulls, I'm going to add that new tag into the layer name, and then I'm going to copy the tag, duplicate the null, and then just rename it to something else. And then just to make our lives a little easier, I'm going to give a different stroke color to this second path so that we can more easily tell them apart and see what's going on. So you'll see now if I move this point out, now we've got a whole separate path all in the same layer, and this point is part of both of those because it's got the tags for both those groups in the layer name. Now I can also start duplicating this null, and now we've got a whole separate path. And this tagging concept doesn't just apply to the layer names, it applies to the effects names as well, both on the base layer and then also on the points. So to show what I mean by that, say I wanted to control something about this red path, like maybe make it closed or rounded, but I didn't want that to happen to the white path. I wanted to have separate control. So what I can do is duplicate the effect, make sure that there's no extra letters or spaces or numbers at the end of the name, and then I'm just going to rename the tag. And so now this effect is going to control this path. So I can add a closed path or I can round the path depending on what I want, and that's going to be controlled separately from the other one. And then also that concept is going to apply to the path points as well. So say on this point here that is part of both the paths, I want it to be linear for the red but not the white, I can duplicate the effect. Again, just take off the extra characters at the end, change the tag to a two, and now I've got separate control for this one over this one. So if I scale it, it's going to add a Bezier handle for the white path, but not the red path. So hopefully that just goes to show a little bit of how you can build some kind of complex looking things, or you can have a single null that's part of multiple paths. Obviously, if you push it too far, you get some really long layer names, but it is a pretty cool way of building some really complex looking things without having way too many layers. Okay, hopefully that gives you enough to get up and running with Shape Rig. We are always just super humbled every time we put something up on play and see how people improve on the things that we've made. So we are just really excited to share this with everyone and see what y'all make with it.