Penpal

For After Effects CC2018 +

$45

Penpal brings bezier power and precision into AE, so that your workflow is free from excessive planning and difficult round-trips to Illustrator.

  • “Penpal is so jam-packed with essential path editing features, I have it permanently docked in my After Effects workspace” - Al Boardman

  • “Penpal has made my workflow so much easier. Gives me really smart basic shape layer functions that I've been wanting for years inside of AE” - Claudio Salas

  • “Penpal is a no brainer. I use it all the time and it should be in the core software” - James Boorman

THE UI PANEL POWER-UP

Version 2 of Penpal brings a huge boost in interactivity with a live, responsive UI panel: Drag elements around in the canvas. Option-drag to smooth or break tangents. Hold Shift to constrain to axes. Enable various levels of snapping.

This UI is based on the one you already know from Ae and other Adobe apps, so it feels familiar from the moment you fire it up. Users of v1 can now work in Penpal more intuitively, more of the time.

And Penpal still goes beyond Adobe standards by letting you select tangents as if they were points. That allows you to drag two or more tangents at the same time, and do things like copy one tangent and paste it to another.

Zero tangents in After Effects with Penpal

Shapes as they really are

Switch between Penpal’s Spaces, and you can work on paths that are transformed by groups, rotation and parenting as if they were still in their original state - with all of Penpal’s functions working in the right-way-up orientation.

You can treat shape layers as if they were precomps, but keep all the Path properties right there in your timeline.

Maximum edit-ability and keyframe control without compromise

design in motion

Here’s just a few of the capabilities Penpal brings to AE:

• Flip paths horizontally or vertically
• Break a path into two separate paths
• Distribute and align points within a shape
• Snap selected points to pixels
• Simplify paths with too many points
• Reverse the direction of points along a path
• Mirror points around an axis to create perfectly symmetrical shapes
• Join two separate paths into one
• Quickly make a broken tangent smooth again

Learn

Penpal is fairly intuitive but it does have a lot of buttons. Watch the Penpal YouTube playlist to see what’s what:

Use the detailed Penpal User Guide as reference when you’re unsure about something. You can access it from within Penpal itself by clicking the Hamburger and then the Help button.

Ask

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Buy now at aescripts.com or download the free trial right here. Penpal is made by renderTom and Steve Kirby