May, 2007
There's a new feature in After Effects CS3 and it's called Tool Creates Shape, and it adds a lot more creativity to working with shapes.
Let's take a closer look at this feature. Start by clicking on shapes or press Q.
If you hold down the button you'll notice several shapes have been added including the star. Let's click on the star.
The first two buttons in the dark gray toolbar are Tool Creates Shape and Tool Creates Mask. We want Tool Creates Shape.
Draw out a star.
Here we see the fill color and stroke color.
Click on the word Fill and you'll notice that there are several options. You can choose a fill type, also it's mode and opacity.
Click on the arrow by Add and you'll see a variety of options available to the shapes.
Let's choose Repeater. Notice that immediately we have three stars.
To make changes to the stars we have to go down and open Repeater options.
We can make changes such as how many copies we want of the shape, how much to offset it, where to place the anchor point, scaling, etc.
So I made the changes above and this is the result.
Let's apply a gradient fill to the star.
Open the Add feature again and choose Wiggle Paths. Try different settings to see the various changes you can make to the star.
We can take a look at the Zig Zag feature as well and play with the settings.
We can add more and more Add effects on top of one another to create some interesting animations not forgetting to manipulate the settings for them.
Download the original source files from this tutorial in Zip format Here
Copyright (c) 2007, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved