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norbyco
Participant
Jan 27, 2023 8:43 PM UTC
Open for Voting

Feature request: Lasso Tool for selecting vertex points, puppet pins, and keyframes

I work with dozens of 2d animators (myself included) who would love to make After Effects shape and puppet pin animations a bigger part of our workflow, but we're limited by the current selection tool. 

 

When animating a complex shape (or a mesh of puppet pins), it can get quite tedious using the rectangle selection to manually select each group of vertices and pins we want to transform.  (I've attached a gif showing how Lasso can be easily twice as fast).

 

Having a Lasso tool (like the one in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Animate) would save us countless hours, help After Effects integrate even more seamlessly with Photoshop & Illustrator, and free us up to create much more complex and beautiful shape, puppet pin, and character animations. Other users have also noted that a lasso selection tool for keyframes in the timeline would also be extremely helpful in their workflows. 

 

 Thanks for reading, and please upvote if you agree! 🙂

 

(Kudos to Armando Javier Saldivar on the old Adobe forum for bring this up previously: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/40682497-lasso-tool-select-vertex-points )

3 replies

Sterphy
Known Participant
Sep 1, 2025 4:31 PM UTC

Great idea!  They will never make it. 

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Participant
Aug 29, 2025 4:48 PM UTC

I can't belive something this basic hasn't been added, I tried for so long because I was sure I was doing something wrong because such basic feature surely must exist and I was just missing some modifier key or enabling something but no, it truly doesn't exist.

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Participant
Feb 23, 2023 9:47 AM UTC

Yes to this... should have been added years ago. Thanks for making the requet

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