Participant

Shift Key No Longer Snaps Rotation to 45° in New After Effects Versions

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
August 15, 2025
17 replies
1910 views

In previous versions of After Effects, when using the Rotate Tool (W), holding Shift would constrain rotation in fixed increments (by default, 45°). In the latest versions, this “angle snap” behavior seems to have been removed, and holding Shift no longer locks rotation to specific angles.

This feature was extremely useful for precise alignment and fast workflow. Could you confirm if this change was intentional? If so, is there any way to re-enable it, or could it be added back in future updates? Also, is there any keyboard shortcut or alternative method that replicates the old behavior?

User interface or workspaces

R

real_5081

Known Participant

Do you ask customers what they want before implementing changes?

martalopezfdez

Participant

same here! Any updates on the issue?

thank you!

SteveBlacker

Participating Frequently

Is this also affecting motion path bezier handle manipulation? For some reason, holding shift while dragging a bezer handle in the comp view window will no longer snap to 45 degree intervals like it did before (or was it 90 degrees for bezer handles?). In any case, snapping isn't working at all now.

J

jonnys30092906

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the reply.

This issue isn't that we don't know how to rotate something by 45° but the snapping feature is now gone.

I don't think people want a workaround they want the 45° snapping back as rotating with snapping is incredibly useful for many many designers, much more useful that 5°.

Of all the many feature requests that people are dying to get implemented I'm really surprised 5° rotation snapping with no options was at the top of the list.

Eugene Reisch

Inspiring

The issue is it's not snapping at all, 5 degrees or otherwise

James Landy

Community Manager

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

We changed snapping from 45-degrees to 5-degree increments in Ae 23.6.0, when holding down the Shift key as you drag layers in the Comp viewer.

And we recently discovered snaping to any degree fails in Ae 25.4 through 25.5. Issue has been fixed in Ae 25.6.

The HelpX docs were not updated at that time to reflect this change, which is resulting in users expecting the old behavior. We’ll correct that mistake and get the HelpX docs updated ASAP.

If you want to rotate by 45-degrees, you can enter the rotation value in the Properties Panel. You can also observe the Info Panel when scrubbing rotation hot text and when rotating a layer in the Comp viewer.