Lattice
Free-form warp from a grid of points you drag on the canvas.
Lattice puts a cage of control points over the layer. Drag a point and the geometry near it follows, smoothly, with no creases between cells.
At 2 × 2 it is a four-point warp. At 4 × 4 or 5 × 5 it is a proper mesh warp — the familiar mesh-warp tool from pro image and motion editors, except the result stays a path.
When to reach for it#
- Fitting artwork onto a curved surface — a label around a bottle, a graphic on a shirt.
- Hand-shaping a deformation that no parametric deformer quite gets.
- Squash-and-stretch poses that need more control than a scale.
How it works#
Drag points on the canvas — that is the interface. Double-click a point to send it home. Points can be pulled outside the layer box to make the shape bulge past its own bounds.
Each handle pulls the geometry near it, and handles you have not touched hold their ground — so dragging one point warps that region rather than sliding the whole shape. With every handle at home the modifier is exactly the identity, which is why a fresh Lattice does nothing until you move something.
It is worth knowing why this is not the textbook Bézier cage. In that basis, interior control points have zero influence on the boundary of the box. That is fine for a 3D mesh full of interior vertices, but a filled vector shape is nothing but boundary — so dragging the centre handle of a 3 × 3 cage would move precisely nothing. Blending each handle's displacement by distance instead means every handle does something.
Parameters#
The size of the grid, 2 to 5 each way. Changing either resamples the warp you already have onto the new grid, so raising the resolution refines your shape rather than throwing it away. 3 × 3 handles most work; 5 × 5 is for detailed surface fitting.
Blends between the original shape and the fully warped one. Keyframe it from 0 to 1 to animate into a warp you shaped by hand. Above 1 exaggerates past what you dragged.
Things that catch people out#
Adding it puts a grid over the layer and changes nothing else — there is no default warp to apply, and inventing one would deform your artwork the moment you added the modifier. Drag a point on the canvas. The panel says so while the grid is still at rest.
A handle governs roughly its own cell and blends into its neighbours. If a drag is not reaching far enough, use fewer columns and rows — a coarser grid gives each handle a wider area.
On an image, video, group or live text there are no points to move, so the layer is sliced into a mesh and each cell is carried on its own transform. That is what makes Lattice usable for fitting a graphic onto a curved surface in a photo. It is a raster warp, so it softens if you zoom a long way in; a shape or vector layer deforms per-vertex and does not.
See also#
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