How to draw a path with fill none in Adobe After Effects

If you’re an Adobe After Effects user, you might run into this scenario. You’re following the tutorial. You’re trying to make a custom path to animate an object, and it says grab your pen tool and draw your shape. Your line, your path. Oh well, that’s not a path. That’s a shape, right? It has a fill. So then you’re going to come in, you’re going to say, okay, I’m trying to change my fill to none. Can’t find it. Right? So in After Effects, to create your fill as none there are different places that you need to look for that versus what you might be used to in Illustrator or Photoshop. In Illustrator and Photoshop, at the bottom of your toolbar, you have a fill and stroke area, and you can select either and click the none, and you can click between them. If you click the actual square or the outlined rectangle, you can pick your color so you get that similar color picker as you get in After Effects. If you have a fill when you use your pen tool, it is going to add a fill. It’s making a shape. If you click on that fill, you can then click none. All right so we know how to make paths in Illustrator. Well how would you do that in After Effects?With your shape layer selected and your shape selected you have these options for shape properties. And you can see that it has stroke color solid color, fill color, solid color. So I can use this dropdown and say none. That’s one way to get to a path. If I go back to solid color, the other way is up from this menu. If you click the blue text fill option, you now get a pop up window where you can choose none. All right, so sometimes the simplest things are hard to find. And I hope that made the process easier for you to switch from drawing a shape with your pen tool to switching to drawing a path. Good luck!