Hooker

What is it?

Hooker is an After Effects CC 2018 and above extension that brings the ability to control each path point individually by hooking it to a layer. This way each point can be animated separately without affecting the rest of them. This brings far more advanced point control options, as you can animate tangents and vertices individually.

How to use it?

Select a path point in the Hooker panel, click a button, and it will follow the layer it is hooked to. Even if you rotate, scale, skew or otherwise transform the path, the hooked points’ positions will stay intact.

For final tweaks, use the Coordinates tab to set path point positions in both composition or shape layer scope.

Features

• Hook/unhook one or more path points at the time.
• Target inTangents, outTangents or Vertices individually.
• Parent inTangents and outTangents to Vertex automatically.
• Create separate hooks for path points or hook them up to selected layer.
• Hooked path points stay in place even if layer or shape transformations are applied.
• Works with Shape Layers as well as any other layers that have Masks.
• Works with multiple paths at the same time.
• Panel shows which path points are hooked and which are not.
• Context menu provides additional way to hook/unhook path points.
• Targets tab shows to what layers currently selected path points are hooked to.
• Coordinates tab lets you position path points in both composition or shape layer scope.

The panel works with Bezier shapes, so all the parametric shapes such as rectangle, ellipse, and star, must be converted to a Bezier shape. To convert a parametric shape to Bezier shape, twirl open the shape layer and right-click the shape path for example, Rectangle 1, and select Convert To Bezier Path