Animating the ends of a rectangle - concorde droop snoot

Report · Jan 02, 2026

I want to animate a rectangle with no fill and at the ends with red dots and where the rectangles intersect so I can add nulls and move the position of the rectangles to create this animation of the concorde visor retracting into the nose. All the parts that interconnect. These form the mechanics of the mechanism visor retract mechanism.

I can get the position of white lines using the beam effect in AE as then you can animate the start and end positions of the beam but using rectangles it is hard to work out how to do the same, such I can that parent bars together or set nulls to animate the working mechanism of the visor retract.

I have tried merge paths of the line over a rectangle to take the difference as a mask, and that wont work as the line is very narrow (and has no volume) against the filled rectangle. Also the create nulls from path feature but that will obviously create 4 nulls for each corner of the rectangle and I want to only manipulate 2 ends.

How is the best way to do this and get a rectangle with no fill for this purpose. I want to put the dots at the end of each bar as in the graphic with blue BG.

Report · Jan 02, 2026

Thanks for reaching out, Simon.

IK rigging using the Duik plug-in could help with animating the rectangles. Here's a tutorial: https://adobe.ly/4sm7M8R

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks,
Nishu

Report · Jan 05, 2026

1. Select the rectangle path and Window>Create Nulls from Path.
2. You now have 4 Nulls for each corner of the rectangle. Find the Null for the bottom left corner, and under Parent & Link choose the Null for the top left corner. Repeat this for the bottom right corner. Now the top left Null controls the entire left side, and same for the top right Null.
3. Create a circle shape and manually place it halfway between the top left and bottom left Nulls. Call it Circle L. Duplicate the circle and place between the top and bottom right Nulls. Call it Circle R.
4. Parent the top left Null to Circle L, and parent the top right Null to Circle R.