Five Layer Effects in the Distortion pack bend a layer’s own plate rather than restyling its pixels. They are all free, all keyframable, and all work on video, image, text, shape, motion, sequence and grid layers — but not on 3D models, which come back from the 3D pass on a neutral full-frame quad and so have no layer box to warp.
Add them from LAYER EFFECTS ▸ +, in the Distortion pack alongside Rig (Puppet) and Droste.
Region Distort
Rescales only what is inside a rectangular band; everything outside it slides along but keeps its own shape. This is the effect for stretching one part of a picture — a bar in a chart, a limb, the middle of a wordmark — without squashing anything else.
- Region X / Y / width / height place the band.
- Stretch X / Y scale what is inside it.
- Feather softens the transition between the stretched band and the rest.
- Keep original size decides whether the layer grows to fit the stretch, or is rescaled back to its original footprint.
Bend
After Effects’ CC Bend It: the layer is rigid outside two handles and bends into an arc between them.
- Start X / Y and End X / Y are the two handles.
- Bend angle is how far the span between them arcs.
- Stretch span decides whether the arc keeps the span’s length or stretches it.
Corner Pin
Maps the layer box onto an arbitrary four-cornered quad through a projective homography — the classic way to lay a screen recording onto a photographed monitor, or a label onto a bottle.
Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Right and Lower Left are the four corners, each with its own X and Y, and each keyframable — so a pinned layer can track a moving surface.
Corner Pin runs after the free-form warps and after Droste, so a recursed or warped layer can then be laid onto a plane.
Mesh Warp
A draggable grid of control points over the layer, with Columns and Rows from 2 to 5. Every point moves independently, so it handles the distortions a four-corner pin cannot: a flag, a cloth, a curved surface, a face pulled into a caricature.
Bezier Warp
Four corners plus two curve handles per edge — twelve control points in all. Where Corner Pin gives you straight edges between four corners, Bezier Warp lets each of the four edges bow, so a layer can be wrapped onto a cylinder, a barrel or a page curl.
The handles are named for the corner they belong to: Top · from UL, Top · from UR, Right · from UR, and so on around the layer.
Which one to reach for
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| Stretch part of the layer, leave the rest alone | Region Distort |
| Arc a span of the layer, rigid at both ends | Bend |
| Lay the layer onto a flat four-cornered surface | Corner Pin |
| Free-form distortion with more than four points | Mesh Warp |
| Four corners with curved edges | Bezier Warp |
| Pin the artwork and pose it like a puppet | Rig (Puppet) |
| Whole-layer shapes — arc, flag, bulge, twist | Warp Styles, in the Overlay Effects chain |
| The lens-angle warp, with an exact inverse | Optics Compensation, in the Overlay Effects chain |
Order
Within a layer’s pipeline the free-form warps run together, then Droste, then Corner Pin — so a recursed or mesh-warped layer can be pinned onto a plane afterwards, rather than the other way round. The whole set runs before Repetile and Motion Blur, and before the layer’s transitions, so a warped layer crosses into the next clip already warped.
Where to go next
- Layer Effects
- Overlay Effects — Warp Styles, Optics Compensation, Turbulent Displace
- Repetile
- Motion Paths
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