• Adobe After Effects

  Animate dragging out box shape with a mouse pointer icon

  Posted by Max Allen on November 1, 2018 at 3:35 pm

  Wondering if anyone can help out; I want to have a mouse arrow dragging a box outline out – just as if you were drawing a text box in InDesign. I’m sure it’s something to do with parenting the box shape to the arrow’s position, but whenever I try that it just expands from the middle rather than top-left and I’m not sure how to constrain it. The GIF below should show what I’m trying to achieve – the box is shown in its ‘finished’ state, but the arrow should be able to drag it out from the top-left.

  

  Andrijana Lu replied 7 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Greg Gesch

  November 1, 2018 at 10:52 pm

  Hi Max, if you want it to scale from the top left select the Pan Behind tool (Shortcut Y) and drag the anchor point to the top left corner.
• 

  Andrijana Lu

  November 2, 2018 at 1:27 pm

  What Greg said – drag the anchor point of the box to the top left corner. Parent mouse pointer to the shape layer. To maintain scale of the mouse pointer while parented, add the following expression to the mouse pointer scale:
  s=[];
  ps=parent.transform.scale.value;
  for(i=0;ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89P3QeplC7Q

  I hope this was helpful.

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