A content-centric model of the universe

…or at least a content-centric anchor point on a shape layer.

I don’t like the way After Effects does shape layers. There, I’ve said it. Here’s my attempt to make things better.

This is another scratching-an-itch script, it fixes the problem of shape layers having their anchor points all over the shop. It re-aligns the anchor point of a newly-drawn shape layers to the center of the layer. It also puts the anchor point of vector paths in their center. Hard to explain, just watch the vid.

Download

You can download this script along with all my other scripts here. Or to download just this script click the download button below.

5 comments

  1. Do you write these scripts to combine them in order to automate the creation of a project? Or are these solutions to problems you faced while working on different projects?

    Reply

    1. A bit of both. some of my scripts are one-off tools to do something related to a particular project, like making lots of layers for a procedural animation, others are general purpose tools where I’ve found myself doing something and thinking that it would be easier to do via a script.
      In this case it just turns out that I missed the memo when they included this function into recent versions of AE. There’s a preference that you can turn on so that it will center shape layers by default.

      Reply

      1. I tend to work really hard on a problem but when it is solve I move on.
        When I saw the number of scripts I wondered if they were pieces to a puzzle of sorts. If If they were modules that could make up common operations in AE, then I would be interested in exploring this further.

        Reply

  2. In AE 2024 I’m getting error “Unable to execute script at line 45. Function pathElements.indexOf is undefined”. I’d love for it to work because I have 100s of anchor points to center. Thanks for your hard work.

    Reply

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