How to scale a shape in any direction in Adobe After Effects

May 14

If you want to scale or resize a shape in only one direction in Adobe After Effects, for example left, up, right, down, I will show you how in this blog post.

How to scale a shape in any direction in Adobe After Effects

First, you want to open your Shape layer, go to “Contents”, “Rectangle”, “Rectangle Path” (or “Ellipse” and “Ellipse Path” if it is a circle) and then unselect “Constrain proportions” next to “Size” to resize the height and width individually.

If you go to “Transform” and “Scale”, it will resize the whole shape, including the stroke, and that is why we are using the “Size” property instead.

Now, to resize the shape in only one direction, hold down “option/alt” while clicking on the stopwatch next to “Anchor Point” (under Transform).
Here you want to paste the expression that you can find in the video description underneath this video, just make sure to put the name of your shape in the first parentheses and the name of your shape path in the second parentheses.

Now, when you resize the width and height with the “Size” property, it will only resize in one direction. ➡️

To do this in the opposite direction, just do the same thing but instead of dividing the width and height in “2” in your expression, divide it in “-2” and now it will grow in the opposite direction. ⬅️

And if you want to move the stroke of this shape to the outside or inside of the shape, check this tutorial.

🎞 Watch the tutorial here!

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Thanks for reading!