I'm having trouble scaling strokes in After Effects

Question

I am new to after effects and I am having trouble understanding scaling shapes. I have an initial shape ( image 1 ) that I wish to expand and animate to a wider shape ( image 2 ). But as you can see, the grey stoke also widens when I expand it when I want it to remain the same stroke width as the previous image and just have the shape widen. Basically I want image 1 to animate to a wider shape and look just like image 3 without the stoke becoming thicker. Hope that makes sense.

Any help will be most appreciated.

Answer 1

If you created the shape with the rounded rectangle tool, then you won't initially have the same control over the transform as you would if you'd made the shape with the pen tool. But there's a simple fix. Just right-click on "Rectangle Path X" and convert to bezier path. Now you'll be able to use the selection tool to draw a marquis around the individual corner points and animate them however you like (just tick the stopwatch next to "path" to create keyframes).

Just to be clear, don't animate the "Scale" transform property x value. This will distort the lines, even after they're converted to a bezier curve. Instead, animate the actual corners of the path.

Answer 2

Animate the x value of the Size property of the rounded rectangle path, rather than the Scale to leave your strokes the same width. This will let you change the size of the rectangle without affecting the stroke size, or indeed the size of the corner radius.

However the down side is that you can't just drag the corners in the comp window, this will affect the scale, rather than the size property, so you have to use the numbers in the properties panel. If that's not the way you work, convert them to Beziers as @Jason Conrad suggested. The down side of that approach is that with a rounded rectangle you're now dealing with eight bezier points and sixteen handles, rather than two numbers. The up side is that you can work with them in the comp window.