How to move the stroke to the inside or outside in After Effects

Apr 28

If you have a stroke around your shape in Adobe After Effects that you want to have on the inside or outside of your shape instead of having it centered on the border, here are two ways of doing that.

How to move the stroke to the inside or outside in After Effects

The first method is to open your shape layer in the timeline, then open “Contents” and “Rectangle” (or whatever shape you have created). Then select “Rectangle”, click “Add” next to “Contents”, and select “Offset Paths”.

This will add the effect to this specific shape instead of the whole layer.

Now, under “Rectangle”, open “Stroke” and check the number next to “Stroke width”. Then open “Offset Paths” and type in that number next to “Amount” AND add “/2” at the end, and then hit enter.

This will automatically calculate the stroke width divided in two (“stroke width”/2) and then offset the stroke with that amount, making it appear to be on the outside of your shape.

To place it on the inside, just simply add a minus sign in front of the number next to “Amount”. However, every time you change “Stroke width”, you need to change the “Amount” again manually, but this leads me to method 2.

The second method is to drag the “pick whip” icon next to “Amount”, down to “Stroke width” so that the number turns red (indicating that the amount changes based on another value, in this case “Stroke Width”).

Now open “Amount” and do the same thing as in method 1, add “/2” at the end of the textbox (or “expression box”) to place it on the outside and click outside that textbox to save it and now the “Amount”-value is automatically changing based on the “Stroke Width”.

And to place the stroke on the inside of the shape, type in “/-2” instead.

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Thanks for reading!