Shape Up 1.06 for After Effects

Define your Shapes layers before adding them to your comp.

ShapeUp is a tool to define your shapes BEFORE creating the shape layers and adding them to your composition. It creates “clean” shapes, either AE’s native parametric shapes or ones using custom paths (without utilising merge paths). Rounding and zigzag vector filters may get added for corresponding shapes. Neither expressions nor animations will be applied. As said – clean – to get you started. Just try the demo version and have a look at the user guide linked below.

MAIN FEATURES

• 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 utilise the comp size, alignment, position of selected layers, grid spacing
• Toggle stroke & fill on/off
• Set colors

ShapeUp is meant as a construction kit to help you when working with standard shapes, e.g. you can quickly create half and quarter sized versions of a “master” rectangle or ellipse or add lines in the same size. Use the input fields with simple math operations to create offsets in size or position.

ShapeUp’s preview displays the defined shape in relation to your active composition to give you an idea about size, position, colors.

Use the “s”-token (selected) in the position fields to easily create the shape at the position of a selected layer, or at the average position with multiple selected layers.

Limitations:

Using the position of a selected object (“s”-token in the position input field) does not work with layers utilising expressions on their position. It works with layers which have one parent, but not if they are rotated or scaled. As ShapeUp is written in “legacy” code, there are some limitations to it’s preview. The preview can’t display all of the details of the shape you are going to create. There are also differences between CS6 and CC. Please have a look at the manual linked below containing a section about that. And try the demo – thanks.

*Note regarding the After Effects June 2019 release (version 16.1.2):

Unfortunately AE 16.1.2 has a bug regarding drawing vector graphics and mouse events within the ScriptUI interface, which results in the disappearing/flickering of these elements. ShapeUp’s build in preview is affected by this issue. So sorry for the temporary inconvenience. The functionality itself is not affected. This specific behaviour doesn’t exist in prior versions of After Effects and should be fixed in the very next minor update of AE. Adobe is informed about this bug and we are hoping for a quick update/fix. Thanks for your understanding and your patience.

Compatibility: After Effects CC 2019, CC 2018, CC 2017, CC 2015.3, CC 2015, CC 2014, CC, CS6

Creator Website

What’s New in Shape Up 1.06

Important bug fix:

ShapeUp’s own preference window would write unusable settings which resulted in unfinished shape creations or would even stop ShapeUp from launching. [Thanks to Joel Daniels for reporting this!]

Changes:

• Cmd/Ctrl Modifier Key:
  • Mac: Switched the previously assigned Mac-Ctrl Key to the proper Mac-Cmd Key.
  • Windows will keep the proper Ctrl Key. Tooltips will display this accordingly.
• “Equal Sides” and “Lock Ratio”(fixed aspect ratio) toggle settings will be saved now with the “Save Current Input Values as Default” within the preferences window and remembered on script launch.