-
Creating an equilateral triangle
Hello,
What a Friday afternoon F&$%-around I’m having. I want to (quickly and easily) draw equilateral triangles inside After Effects (no, I don’t want to draw triangles in illustrator and copy and paste the path). I want to know the triangle is perfectly equilateral regardless of size. From some terse searching, every tutorial and forum I’ve found seems to suggest (or outright claim) that the polygon tool reduced to 3 points WILL produce an equilateral triangle… but it does not!?
Am I crazy (pls don’t answer that)? Whether I double-click the shape tool or shift-click and draw a polygon, then twirl down and reduce the points to 3, I get the same result: not equilateral.
Proof attached in a screen grab. https://f1.creativecow.net/file/12511/12511_notequilateral.jpg.zip
In this example I want a triangle with all 3 sides all equal to 60 pixels. According to math, an equilateral triangle has a circum-radius (aka the “outer radius” property in a polystar path) of side length divided by the square root of 3; 60/√(3) = 34.64
Am I making some basic error? Can anyone recommend a straight forward way to draw a (perfectly) equilateral triangle. Drawing with the pen tool or copying paths from another program are either imperfect or an annoying extra step.
please help ,
Matt
-
5 Replies
-
I don’t see the problem. Why do you say that is not an equilateral triangle? All three sides are the same length, 60 pixels. If you are expecting the height to also be 60 pixels, you’ve misunderstood what an equilateral triangle is.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Yup. I appreciate your response. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
-
Thanks Dave,
This technique will be useful moving forward.
-
There’s now a free script that will create an equilateral triangle in After Effects for you!
-
Assuming your display is set to 1:1 and not some squished setting.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up