How to get Uniform Scale Wiggle in After Effects

An Expressions tutorial. 

The wiggle expression is a great way to introduce randomness to your image, solid or shape in After Effects, but when applied to scale it wobbles both dimensions separately.  What happens if you want to wiggle them both together? Don’t worry, it’s a simple solution and just requires a little bit of understanding about how the Wiggle Expression works.

With your shape/solid, hit “S” on the timeline to expose the scale property. Hold alt and click on the stopwatch.

You normally type:

wiggle(5,50)

This gives you a regular wiggle, with both the horizontal and vertical doing their thing.

Trouble is, the wiggle expression is smart enough to know if it’s attached to a property with 1, 2, or 3 dimensions, and as a result produces an array of wobbling units.

To make a uniform scale wiggle, we need to bypass that array by only picking the first option, and to do that, we start the expression again by typing:

var w = wiggle(5,50)

So “5 times per second, select a random value up to 50 (percent in this case) away from the original value.”

W is our array, so now on a new line, type:

[w[0],w[0]]

So for the width and height properties, we’re using the w[0] for both. 

And if you want to keyframe this, check out my video on Keyframing a Wiggle.

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