How to resize without distortion in Adobe After Effects

You might have tried to resize a shape in After Effects, (maybe with rounded corners or a stroke,) just to notice that the corners and the stroke get distorted when resizing.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you a solution that will not only help you resize your object without distortion but also how you can achieve this when you want to resize a shape in only one direction.

To show you how this works, I have created three identical shapes in three different colors, Red, Yellow, and Green.

If I resize the red shape, by going to “Transform” and “Scale”, it will get distorted, as you can see.

If I resize the yellow one, by going to “Contents”, “Rectangle 1”, “Rectangle Path 1” and “Size”, it will not get distorted.

However, if you move the anchor point to one of the corners, hoping that this will help you grow your shape in only one direction, it doesn’t work.

Luckily, there is a way to get around this, using an expression.

I’m going to show this by using my third and final shape, the green one.

Under “Contents”, “Rectangle 1” and “Transform”, you click the stopwatch next to “Anchor Point” while holding down the “alt”-button.

Now you “copy and paste” the expression from the video description below and then click somewhere outside the textbox to activate this and then move your shape to where you want it to be.