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leo_5106
Participating Frequently
February 14, 2025
Question

Replacing a Shape While Keeping Keyframes in After Effects

  • February 14, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 487 views

Hey everyone,

I'm working on some simple Lottie animations and have already created an animated design using circles with different stroke sizes around them. I animated them with keyframes and now want to recreate the same animation but with different shapes—hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs—instead of circles.

 

I know that in After Effects, you can replace footage and images, but I haven't found a way to swap out shapes while keeping all existing keyframes intact. Does anyone know a way to do this?

If there's a plugin that could make this process easier, I'd love to hear recommendations.

 

Thanks in advance!

1 reply

Rene Andritsch
Community Expert
Rene AndritschCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 14, 2025

Have you tried to copy the shape group of the other shapes and copy it to the Contents of the already animated Shape?

 

 

L
leo_5106Author
Participating Frequently
February 15, 2025

Here is the file I'm working on. This file was made from a circle, but now imagine any shape—let's say a flower—I would like to replace the circle with it.

Rene Andritsch
Community Expert
Rene AndritschCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 15, 2025

@leo_5106 I might have an idea for you. First try to create your animations just with one shape layer and a repeater. This way you could swap out the circle for other shapes. To swap out the shapes create an empty shape layer and add a path in AE. Then create your shapes inside Illustrator at roughly the same size and copy the illustrator path onto the After Effects Path.

 

 

Then copy the next Illustrator Path and paste it into the AE path …

 

As Lottie will not support the repeater you have to “convert” the repeater into separate shape layers before exporting. There is a script on aeScripts that can do that: https://aescripts.com/shape-repeater-baker/

I attach your AE file with a second comp and the AI file for you to experiment with the path replacement before you consider this option to work for you.


It won’t let me upload the ai file I showed above but you can recreate that easily in Illustrator.

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