How to scale your UI Animation to any size in After Effects

Click here to download the source files and follow along

Sometimes I discover something amazing in After Effects. This is one of those times.

Over the years, it just so happens that occasionally I need to take my UI Animation composition and resize it.

I’ve found all kinds of creative ways to make this happen. Usually it involves me taking many deep breaths and attempting to not pull my hair out. For projects with 3D and cameras, it is a total mess, and can take a fair amount of time.

No longer.

My buddy Luigi whom I’ve been working with showed me this last month and it kind of blew my mind. It’s built into After Effects and is a simple script.

Here is the step by step:

1. Duplicate your composition
2. Double click it
3. Go to File > Scripts > Scale Composition.jsx

From there you can choose to scale by a factor (say 50%), or enter a numeric height or width. That’s it!

Some caveats: if you have effects or cameras with depth of field, you may need to tweak things to make it work. In the tutorial video I show you how to do this.

Basically, this is one of those instances where I wish I could go back in time and teach this to myself, which means that I had to share it with you!

Happy prototyping,

Issara

PS: I had to figure this out because I’m close to releasing a super cool resource that instantly creates 3D UI animation shots from your projects, complete with camera movement. Here is a sample of the shots it creates from your project files.