Custom After Effects Plugins

Using AI to Build the Tools I Wish Existed

After twenty years in After Effects, there are certain looks, like reeded glass, bleeding ink, or Risograph halftones, that always end up needing a messy stack of fifteen adjustment layers and pre-comps. I started wondering: what if instead of asking AI to generate the final image, I asked it to build the custom plugin I actually needed?

I don’t know how to write code, so I pointed Google Antigravity at the Adobe After Effects SDK, described the exact controls and visual behaviour I wanted as a motion designer, and went back and forth testing until we had nine working macOS plugins. It’s all about shortening the gap between thinking “I wish I had a button for this” and actually having it in my Effects menu.

Role: Concept, Look Development & Creative Direction (built with Google Antigravity).

001. Solco

Solco gives you the look of architectural reeded and fluted glass inside After Effects in a single effect, with controls for the glass ridges, refraction, highlights, and a bit of organic wobble.

↓ Download Solco.plugin (macOS)

002. China

China (pronounced [ˈki.na], “kee-nah”—the Italian word for India ink, inchiostro di china) simulates the way real liquid ink bleeds and spreads through porous paper fibres, something a standard blur or turbulence effect never quite gets right. A multi-substep GPU capillary solver keeps the interior of shapes solid while breaking up the edges into organic smudges, watery washes, and dark coffee-ring puddles.

It includes two distinct ink engines—Dendritic (Fern) for fine branching capillary veins and Watercolor (Smudge) for multi-tonal blooms—plus sliders for bleed distance, active edge coverage, paper grain, drying rate, and a custom Control Layer to drive where and when the ink starts spreading.

↓ Download China.plugin (macOS arm64)

003. Punto

Punto brings the tactile feel of a Risograph print into After Effects, complete with halftone dot screens, soy-ink colour palettes, slightly misaligned colour plates, and paper grain.

↓ Download Punto.plugin (macOS arm64)

004. Stria

Stria stretches pixels outward from a point along any angle. I made it for those everyday moments when you quickly need to extend a background plate or turn a small element into a directional motion smear.

↓ Download Stria.plugin (macOS arm64)

005. Fumo

Most smoke and fluid plugins ask you to keyframe emitters in empty space. With Fumo, I wanted a plugin that watches your layer directly and lets the motion inside the footage push the pixels and smoke plumes around like liquid, picking up the colours of the shot as it moves.

Completely rebuilt with a fast GPU Navier-Stokes fluid solver, it reads motion automatically via Lucas-Kanade optical flow or locks onto an external Optical Flow Layer (32-bpc float or RSMB) to drive both energy-preserving pixel distortion and drifting smoke wisps—with controls for thermal buoyancy, wind, swirl turbulence, smoke tint, and multi-substep final renders.

↓ Download Fumo.plugin (macOS arm64) ↓ Download ParticleFlowX.plugin

006. DoomFire

DoomFire brings the iconic 1993 retro fire cellular automaton from the PSX port of DOOM into After Effects as a high-performance native plugin. Inspired by Fabien Sanglard’s classic breakdown How DOOM fire was done, it runs the authentic 37-color cellular automaton engine right on your timeline.

It works both as a procedural fire generator and on Adjustment Layers—letting you ignite flames directly from layer alpha or luminance silhouettes (like burning text or logos). Features include authentic PSX and themed palettes, animatable fuel levels for ignition and burnouts, 360° burn angles, wind drift, and optical heat-wave refraction that shimmers background pixels.

↓ Download DoomFire.plugin (macOS arm64) Read Original Article ↗

007. LightTrailX

Getting smooth long-exposure light trails in After Effects usually means wrestling with the built-in Echo effect, which stamps out stepping, dotted copies of fast-moving frames. LightTrailX is a native Metal GPU long-exposure and neon light-trail engine that bridges up to 32 frames of history into continuous, silky ribbons.

It isolates bright highlights (with a soft knee) and glowing Sobel neon outlines, then tracks motion automatically across frames or locks onto an external optical flow pass (32-bpc float or RSMB). As the trails age, you can push them with directional wind, swirl their tails through divergence-free curl turbulence, split RGB wavelengths with chromatic dispersion, tint them across five colour modes (Original Color, Prism Rainbow, Cyberpunk Neon, Warm Tungsten Comet, or a Custom Gradient), and finish them with an anamorphic HDR phosphor bloom.

↓ Download LightTrailX.plugin (macOS arm64)

008. KnitX

KnitX turns any precomp, typography, or footage layer into a tactile 3D knitted wool jumper in real time on the GPU. It weaves interlocking yarn loops across five stitch topologies (Stockinette / Jersey, 1×1 and 2×2 Ribbing, Garter / Purl Ridges, Braided Cable Knit, and Cross-Stitch), complete with 3-ply helical twist, underpass tuck shading, cloth gravity sag, and row-by-row unraveling.

Because in real life you cannot have a single stitch half with one colour and half with another, a Uniform Stitch Color checkbox locks each individual V-loop to a single continuous dyed yarn colour (with optional Fair Isle palette quantization and heathered wool fleck). And for that lived-in jumper texture, Mohair Rogue Strands sprouts thin, backlit flyaway wool fibres with independent controls for density, length, and curl.

↓ Download KnitX.plugin (macOS arm64)

009. DifferentialLineX

DifferentialLineX brings biological differential growth into After Effects as a real-time Metal GPU simulation. A connected loop of nodes splits and relaxes under neighbour attraction and short-range repulsion, folding into intricate brain-coral labyrinths and ruffled flora without ever crossing over itself.

Instead of growing in empty space, the curve reads a Signed Distance Field (SDF) from your layer’s alpha silhouette (or a custom Collider Layer)—letting you either pack a character or piece of type from the Inside, or wrap moving footage from the Outside like a living halo. In Advected Temporal mode, optical flow carries the growing lines and 3D topographic trail ridges along with your footage, automatically spawning new loops when fresh islands appear and collapsing edges when shapes shrink.

↓ Download DifferentialLineX.plugin (macOS arm64)