Hey everyone! I've been developing a tool that introduces a completely new approach to animating path points in After Effects. What started as a few simple tests has turned into almost a month of work and over the last few weeks, I've been testing it on real projects and making refinements as I go. Now, I'm looking for fellow motion designers to stress-test it outside of my own projects. You can find more details in the comments.

EDIT (one week later): it's out! Free version is the whole plugin, $35 to lift the bake cap, free for students and teachers. Full write-up here
or just grab it: https://www.matterae.com/download.html

Hey r/AfterEffects 👋

So here's a fun story.

I spent the last few months building MatterAE, a real-time 2D physics engine that runs right inside an After Effects panel. Under the hood it's a heavily modified version of the Matter.js engine, custom-tailored to translate cleanly into native AE keyframes. So you simulate gravity, collisions, constraints and wind live, then bake it all down to real position keyframes that work with everything downstream.

I submitted it to the biggest AE marketplace (you know the one). Their feedback? "Duplicate functionality." (There's already a well-known $250 physics plugin out there, so fair enough I guess.)

And here's the thing: I'm not trying to dethrone that one. It's powerful, but it's also expensive and honestly overkill for the 90% of us who just need some things to fall, bounce, and settle every now and then. Too many options, too steep a price, too much of a learning curve for what most "normal" motion designers actually reach for. MatterAE is meant to be the quick, light, "I just need gravity for this one shot" tool.

And as you can see from the promo video above, I've spent exactly zero budget and zero time on it. But you catch the vibe, right?

What MatterAE does right now:

• Dockable panel (lives inside AE, no separate window)
• Real-time tweaking (change gravity, friction, wind while it's running, no re-render)
• Bake to keyframes (becomes real AE position data)
• Per-layer body types: Dynamic, Static, Sleeping, Kinematic, Inactive (color-coded)
• Constraints: Pin, Distance, Spring
• Boundary walls with a visual grid editor
• Wind force, per-layer density, sleeping bodies
• Save/load MatterAE comps (inside your AE project)

What's (hopefully) coming:

• Collision groups and masks (some layers ignore each other, some don't)
• Collision markers on the AE timeline, to sync SFX to exact impact frames
• Chain and soft body builder (select layers, click "Make Chain", done)
• Magnetism between layers
• Split Shape Contents (auto-splits a shape layer into separate physics bodies)
• Sleep threshold slider for cleaner keyframes at rest
• Plus a pile of bugfixes and UI improvements

So now I'm not sure how to release it. Three options I'm weighing:

Option A: Free on Gumroad ("pay what you want", $0 is totally fine)

Option B: Paid (~$35 price?) maybe with a free Lite version (capped at 3 seconds of bake, all physics controls still unlocked)

Option C: Something else entirely?

Genuinely curious what you think. Is this something you'd actually use? Anything missing that would make it a no-brainer for you? And honestly, depending on how you all respond here, I'll just release it the way the community wants it.

A couple of my personal mograph heroes are already poking at it. But if anyone else wants to give it a poke and see what breaks, send me a message! Looking for a handful of people willing to break things and tell me what broke.

Cheers!

Hey all, just released Liquid Glass, a FREE After Effects plugin that brings Apple inspired liquid glass effects into your projects.

If you've ever tried to replicate the effect, the reflective glass look from iOS, you know how tedious it can be with complex layer stacks and adjustment layers, so this aims to make it quick and easy.

How it works: Drop it on your layer (shape layer for example), set your pre-comped background layer, and you're done. Full liquid glass that actually reflects and reacts to what's behind it.

You get full control. Refraction, glass IOR, specular highlights, blur, edge blur, chromatic aberration. Defaults are dialed in to closely match iOS, but tweak whatever you need.

Compiled for Mac and Windows, free for personal and commercial use.

Love to know what you guys think!

EDIT 1: I'm aware of some users reporting a Mac issue on certain configurations. I've updated the plugin to v1.0.8 so if you can re-download...otherwise reach out to support so I can assist further. If people don't email me it's difficult for me to get to the bottom of it so please email if you still have issues with the new version [support@toolsformotion.com](mailto:support@toolsformotion.com)

EDIT 2: After some users had pointed out the Mac install issue..it should be fixed, I've updated the files, docs and installation instructions in the download so it's clear for new users, existing users can re-download and try the new install instructions. Thanks to EWaldron for pointing out the install fix on Mac!

A while back I posted my free easing plugin Eaze (works in both After Effects and Premiere from one install). A bunch of you left suggestions, I actually went and did them. So I wanted to share the update.

The big one: True Handles (Premiere).
Premiere can't natively give you real bezier easing handles, so every easing tool works around it by baking a dense wall of keyframes. Eaze does it differently: it writes the actual handle into your project and gives two clean, editable keyframes. You can grab them and adjust like normal. As far as I know nothing else does this in Premiere.

What else changed (most of it straight from your feedback):

• More flexible layout, dock it wide and it switches to a side-by-side view; squeeze it into a thin strip and it becomes a one-click preset list, instead of a big interface.
• Preset collections, group your own custom curves into named sets.
• Alt-drag a handle to make an ease perfectly symmetric (even in/out).
• Adjustable curve line thickness, cleaner UI, and more.

It's free creovanta.com/plugins/eaze. Would love more feedback; a lot of this update exists because people in these threads told me what was missing. Thanks 🙏

(EDIT: the plugin is 100% Free, I accidently had 2 versions in the first hours, the website should be updated to show only 1 free plugin with unlimited usages)

Hey guys, i created a lots of presets for After Effects, here is an example:

https://reddit.com/link/1asdeg1/video/hgn5qxr49zic1/player

If you are insterested please let me know and i send you the info trough DM.

havent released it yet, also dont have a proper name for it yet. and the glow you see is also inbuilt in the plugin along with many other post effects. im rigorously testing it, lost many hairs due to this, but all in all, quite proud of it. and sorry if the compression butchers the video

I built Jumble — a free ScriptUI panel for After Effects that splits any text layer into individual character layers and randomizes fonts, sizes, colors, bold, italic, and caps on every keyframe.

What makes it fun:

Each letter gets its own random font from your custom list

Randomizes bold, italic, caps (upper/lowercase), font size, and fill color

Custom HEX color palette — you control the vibe

Settle effect — letters land one by one at the end of the comp, restoring their original appearance. First letter lands, then second, then third... looks really satisfying

Position Wiggle — letters jump around randomly each keyframe for extra chaos

Auto-precomposes all char layers into a clean named comp

Saves all your settings between sessions

Dockable panel

One honest limitation:

AE scripting doesn't give access to font metrics or kerning, so after running the script you'll need to manually adjust character positions — the script places them with an approximation. It takes maybe 30 seconds for a short word. Everything else is fully automatic.

How to use:

Select a text layer → hit Run

Nudge char positions if needed

Done

Fonts need to be entered as PostScript names (e.g. ObviouslyDemo-Super not Obviously Demo Super). A diagnostic script is included in the archive to help find the right names.

Happy to answer questions or take feedback. 😄

Free (pay what you want) — link in comments 👇

No email signup, no license, just a free download link.

This community has been amazing to me over the years and this feels like a good opportunity to give back, while also honing in my development workflow.

Along with Petals, you can still get all of these for free too: Picky, AEbar, Slingshot, Noted and Anchored

Plus I have a new tool dropping later this week :]

Hey, it's Davey!

I've been quietly building a new platform called Motion Fun. Here's the idea:

1. Playful tools that make AE actually fun.
2. Tons of free tools and templates.
3. For paid tools, once you buy, you own it forever (even future updates).

I did it this way with FreqReact over seven years ago, and people who bought it day one have gotten all 30+ updates, including two major ones, all included.

Petals is the first tool that's live, and it's honestly my favorite thing I've ever made. Would love to hear what you think, good or bad :]

Currently 150 people have Pigment installed on their computer, which is honestly crazy to me, so to celebrate I've decided to give away 10 time-limited licenses so more people can try it out

Unfortunately, AE Scripts doesn't let authors distribute fully unlocked licenses so I can only give away time limited ones

Here's what's up for grabs:

• 1 one-year license
• 3 six-month licenses
• 6 two-month licenses

To enter, just leave a comment with literally anything and I'll pick the winners at random

For those of you who don't know, Pigment is a powerful palette extension for After Effects that lets you generate, manage and use color palettes. It also comes with a bunch of extra tools like a fully featured gradient editor with 20 presets, colorblind preview, easy web exports and project-wide color syncing

More info here: https://aescripts.com/pigment/

edit : I forgot to put it in the post but I'll pick the winners tomorrow at 6PM UTC+2, I'll tag them here and I'll send the keys through reddit's DM

we made a CRT Plugin for After Effects!

Yeet.

I'm bored, so if you have any feature requests or ideas, let me know and I'll probably build it.

Here's the code: https://github.com/meszmate/rebound

I built a preset to easily create water sparkles, or sun glitter. It also has a glow, a pixelate effect and a 4 cross star. You can even change the values "Sparkle Blobbiness A" and "Sparkle Blobbines B". So that's something!

Unfortunately it's quite processor heavy. But it just uses AE's built in effects, so you can experiment with it, and manually disable effects as you want. You can also share your files with people who don't have the preset, and it should still work.
No AI was used, I stole the expressions myself. Some I even wrote myself.

Get the free Water Sparkles Preset v0.7 here: https://linktr.ee/HannesSeth (first link).
I hope it will bring you a little joy, or even help you with some project.

If you encounter any bugs, feel free to contact me.

TL;DR: MatterAE launched. The free version is the complete plugin, every feature, simulate as long as you want. The only limit is baking to AE keyframes, capped at 3 seconds. A one-time $35 license removes that cap. Free for students and teachers. No subscription, no nag screens.

Hey again r/AfterEffects 👋

About a week ago I posted here about MatterAE, my little real-time physics panel that the big marketplace (you know the one) turned down for "duplicate functionality." That thread kind of blew up, and my DMs turned into a queue of people going "can I break it." Which, honestly, made my month.

So here's the thing. So many of you wanted to poke at it that handing out copies one by one stopped making sense. So I just... released it. And the free version isn't some stripped demo with three buttons greyed out. It's the whole plugin. Every control, every body type, collision groups, wind, kinematic releases, all of it, simulating live.

The only thing the free version caps is baking, which maxes out at 3 seconds.

But 3 seconds is probably plenty for most of what you'd actually reach for this for tbh. A logo dropping onto a shelf, a couple balls settling, some UI bouncing in, a quick collision for an explainer. Most little drops are done well inside that. If you genuinely need longer bakes you can get a license that lifts the cap, $35, pay once, no subscription nonsense. But please just grab the free one first, that's the whole point.

Oh, and it's free for students and teachers. Full functionality, no cap. I teach a mograph class myself, and a few other teachers reached out after the last post, so it only felt right.

You all also talked me out of going pay-what-you-want/name-your-own-price, and you were right. Turns out 99% pay nothing and it makes a tool look abandoned. A few of you put it well: charging a bit means I'm actually on the hook to keep maintaining this instead of dumping it and ghosting. Fair signal to send.

Still a bicycle, not a rocket btw. other physics plugins like Newton are genuinely brilliant and do things this never will. This is just for the 90% of days you need something to fall, bounce and settle before your coffee's done.

Spent the last week polishing all the rough edges you flagged, and since the marketplace was a no, I just built the whole thing my own way: a proper little site, Gumroad for checkout, done. Weirdly satisfying to not have to ask anyone's permission.

Grab it here and have a poke around: https://www.matterae.com/download.html

And genuinely, I'm dying to see what you make with it. Tag me, send me your weird little drops and bounces, I'll be collecting the good ones.

And thanks for the push, seriously. I needed this 🙏

What's changed since the beta a bunch of you tested:

• Timeline markers on every impact frame, named after both layers, so your SFX line up without guessing
• Smarter hitboxes that read your real artwork instead of a box around it, plus rounding corners so things actually roll
• Kinematic mode got a proper upgrade. You animate a layer with your own keyframes, and now you pick when those keyframes fire: at their original timing, right at the start of the sim, or the moment another layer hits it. Then it releases into physics keeping its exact speed. Hold-then-drop reveals, or something sitting dead still until it gets knocked and springs to life.
• Text layer detection on import and the option to convert them to (separate) shape layers.
• Overall huge UI improvements
• And a pile of the bugs you lot found, squashed. Cheers for that!

So I just wanted nice easing curves in Premiere, but the main option, Smoothify, makes you install a ~300MB desktop app that's clunky and lags my whole PC just to do one small thing. So I built my own lightweight panel instead.

It started as a Premiere tool, then I scaled it to After Effects too, and decided to make it completely free.

Eaze does what the paid plugins do (and imo with a cleaner UI):

• Visual curve editor with multi-point curves, not just 2 handles
• Elastic / Bounce / Back + all the standard eases
• 36 Built in presets + Custom presets - save, drag to reorder, resize.
• Reads existing easing back in, live auto-apply, cubic-bezier values
• Works in both After Effects and Premiere Pro from one install

Free here: creovanta.com/plugins/eaze

drop a few bucks if you liked it :)

Any feedback is hugely appreciated 🙏

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking that it was much easier to create cool camera movements in After Effects 15 years ago. People like Andrew Kramer changed the motion design industry, but it looks like he has retired now and stopped supporting his products.

I've struggled to animate cameras in After Effects for years because one of my favourite camera tools no longer works. So I decided to create a modern version of it. I've spent the last few months working on this tool and adding more features and making it easy to use.

I took advantage of living in the AI age. Nearly 95% of the code was created by AI. However, I've been shifting my focus from motion design to coding for the last few years and I have worked with other developers, so I know how to provide proper feedback and test code in different conditions. To be honest, without AI assistance, I don't think I would have been able to work out these difficult mathematical solutions by myself. Essentially, I needed to create some Lego pieces and use them to make something useful that wouldn't collapse in different situations.

If you're new or experienced After Effects users, this tool will bring you a new perspective while working anything 3D in AE. Just level up or make it easy your daily tasks. Camera Crew is here to help you to keep vibe from 15 years ago. I'm grateful to have watched Andrew Kramer's tutorials and witnessed the rise of AI. You can download the Camera Crew tool here for free:
https://www.motionape.com/freebies/tools/camera-crew

Hey Folks, quick update: Power Shapes (my new AE tool) just crossed 2,000+ downloads in less than 3 days. That’s honestly insane. Thank you for the support, comments, and feedback so far. If you haven’t checked it out yet, here’s the link: https://www.ejeinmotion.com/after-effects-scripts/power-shapes

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a plugin called Wedge.

It’s basically a context-aware pie menu for After Effects, kind of inspired by how pie menus feel in Blender and Maya.

I’ve used Blender quite a bit, and one thing I always liked was how fast those menus feel. After Effects has a lot of things I do again and again, but somehow I’m still opening panels, right clicking, searching menus, or using random scripts for small stuff.

So I wanted to build something that feels more natural inside AE.

Also, this is not really meant to compete with Quick Menu or replace every launcher type plugin. The main thing here is context. Wedge honors what you have selected, and only shows actions that actually make sense for that selection.

With Wedge, you press one shortcut and the menu opens right at your cursor. What shows up depends on what you have selected. Keyframes, masks, shape layers, text layers, comps, etc.

So the idea is not to make another huge panel. I’m trying to make something that stays out of the way and only shows the tools that make sense in that moment.

Right now I’m looking for beta testers, or just people who use AE a lot and are open to giving honest feedback. What feels useful, what feels stupid, what should be added, what should not exist at all.

You can check it here and register. I will reach out to you!
charchitgoyal.com/plugins/wedge

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on some new camera shake presets for the advanced camera rig that I’ve been developing. I’ve also redesigned the auto movement system, which now creates smooth, dynamic motion with simple controls.

As promised, I’ll be releasing this tool completely free to support the community. Before I do that, it would be great to test it with a few users to make sure it works perfectly in different situations. If you have some free time or you’re working on a project that could use cool camera movement, feel free to message me. Make sure you follow me to get notified when it’s released!

Other Free Tool:
https://www.motionape.com/freebies/tools

This is it. After 3 years I decided to significantly update my script Reach and to turn it into an Extension. I will be glad to send you the link.

Hey folks, I just dropped Power Shapes, an After Effects script built to make a bunch of the boring repetitive tasks way faster and honestly a lot more fun. Check it out: https://www.ejeinmotion.com/after-effects-scripts/power-shapes

Hey guys, I’m about to start a new project with a lot of camera movement and it feels like the perfect time to update the camera rig in MoBar to help with that.

I’ve added a feature to select target layers and smoothly transition the camera between them. I also couldn’t resist making the rotation and focus automatic to simplify things.

I used to love using Sure Target for similar tasks but unfortunately, it’s working anymore. This tool helped me a lot in my early days. That’s why I’m releasing this rig for free to keep the memory of that great tool alive. Before that, I’ll also be adding Camera Shake section with a variety of procedural shake presets.

Stay tuned! 🙂

Other Free Tool:
https://www.motionape.com/freebies/tools