In this case, the keyframes are on the layer itself and not the shape layers. To see those key frames, select all three layers, and come over here to Animation, and down here towards the bottom, we have Reveal Properties with Keyframes. If we hit spacebar to play this animation, you can see that these shapes move, and that's because we have key frames on these layers. One good way to look at it is that shapes live inside of layers, layers live inside of compositions. As we've seen so far, if you want to find a shape layer, twirl down the layer, and you'll find the contents, and inside there, will live the shapes. Shape layers, on the other hand, live inside of a layer. Layers are what you'll find in the timeline as number, 1, 2, 3, and so on. There are pretty much any external file that you'll bring to After Effects, versus shape layers which are created internally. In After Effects, a layer can be an audio file, a Photoshop file, a cinema 4D file. Those two terms can be confusing, since they both used the word layer. Now's probably a good time to clarify some of this terminology I've been using. And likewise, we can use three points to create a triangle. And instead of four points, we can have one that's created with 12 in order to create a circle. That same Polystar can be used inside of another layer. So under my Square, for instance, you can see I have a Polystar that is set to four points to create a square. Inside each of these layers is one shape. In my timeline here, I have three layers. Another important characteristic is that we can have one shape per layer. That's one of the major advantages to shape layers is that you can always go back and change it, and you can keyframe this over time to create an animation. And maybe we want to have instead of pointed corners, we want rounded corners. Right now, it has five points, but I can always go back and change this up to something like 10. And here's all the properties that create this particular star. So here in our shape layer, let's twirl this down, and under Contents, here's our shape, the Polystar path. And what I mean by that is that we can go back at any point and change up the initial properties of the shape. Another important distinction is that shape layers are considered live. But for now, it's just important to know that these tools can do two different jobs.
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We'll get into the specifics on how to build each of these in a later movie. Depending on the context, we can use them to create, either a brand new shape layer or a new mask. Both of these were created with the same tools, as found up here. Here, we have a shape in the form of a star, and underneath, if we twirl this down, you can see that here's our shape layer, and past that, we have a mask. And just like in Photoshop, masks can be used to hide or reveal portions of a layer. Another thing to note about shape layers is that the same tools used to create them can also be used to create masks.
It's just important to note here that once we scale past 100%, vectors will always retain their quality. And it's up to you to decide which best to use in your given situation. In fact, both vectors and bitmaps have their pluses and minuses. Now, that's not to say that shape layers are to be used 100% of the time. It's a quality degradation that doesn't exist with vectors. And that's what's creating this stair-stepping or aliasing effect. With a scaling up of 500%, we're telling After Effects to take the existing detail in the bitmap image and create detail where there is none. You can see that on the left, the vector version that's created with shape layers is much sharper than the version that's created on the right with pixels. Now, the difference between the two isn't readily obvious, until we take both of these and scale 'em up to, say, 500% here.
And both on the left and right, we have similar looking bits of artwork, except one is made mathematical with vectors on the left, and on the right, we have the artwork created with pixels or a bitmap image. To show you what I mean, let's come over here to the second composition. One characteristic is that shape layers are scalable to any size. And this movie, we'll take a look at what makes shape layers unique. By grouping these visual building blocks, we can create more complex pieces to use in our projects. In some ways, it's a lot like a little animatable version of Adobe illustrator, directly inside of After Effects. Meaning that we can always go back to their initial state to make changes, which ultimately opens up for experimentation. Shape layers are a crucial component in the After Effects tool set.