How do I pick whip the line cap property of stroke

[klaush55119029]

Hi!

I have a shape layer with a path in it and the path has a stroke. I'd like to control the "Line Cap" property of that stroke to make the ends rounded or not rounded.

The problem I have is that, even though the Line Cap property has a pick whip button behind it, it cannot be pick whipped to any other property.

Is there a way to control it?

Cheers

[Mike_Abbott]

That's not a directly animatable property. Are you sure you're not looking at the parent and link pickwhip?

If you're looking for just 'easier access' in general you might want to check out the glouriously named : "Butt capper" here:

https://www.battleaxe.co/buttcapper

[klaush55119029]

Hmmmm... This is what I'm looking at. And if you grab that pick whip, you can't do anything with it. Maybe Adobe just did not bother removing it from the UI!?

If I create a slider control and pick whip it to the Line Cap property of a Stroke, the slider control becomes the index number of the Line Cap type selected in the drop-down box (1="Butt Cap", 2="Round Cap" ...). So, my intuition was: If it works this way around, you should also be able to use a slider control to control the Line Cap property in just the same way (set the slider to a number and have the Line Cap property take on the respective entry from its drop-down list).

I guess intuition is not always what Adobe's UI developers have in mind.

Anyway, thanks for the link. I'll check if it's what I need.

[Mike_Abbott · Accepted solution]

Yes - I understand where you're coming from : )

That is the 'parent and link' pickwhip, and yes you can extract the line cap / join data  - but you can't do anythng with it in terms of expressions as the propety isn't keyframable.

[David Arbor]

I've filed this bug before. As Mike said, dropdowns aren't keyframeable, therefore they can't have expressions and the Property Pickwhip shouldn't be there. Given that all properties now automatically have this new pickwhip (which I love), it seems like it was an all or nothing situation, and each type of dropdown would have to be manually uncoupled from that pickwhip. I'm sure that's a fair amount of work, but for something that's not actually causing a problem, I suspect the AE team decided to leave this alone and focus on problematic bugs and feature development.

[Rick Gerard]

You can't keyframe the line cap but you can create an animation preset that adds or changes the stroke options. the animation preset will also set the color, opacity, and width. I have one that I use all when I need to change a bunch of strokes, then I just go back and edit the color and width of the selected strokes. I also use it to strokes to multiple paths