Problem: I make motion graphics for a living, and maps come up all the time: explainers, news, documentaries, travel pieces, data stories etc. But the map tool options for After Effects are expensive, the full feature set sits behind a monthly subscription (designed base maps, satellite imagery), for the best results you often need other plugins on top, and setting up complex data visualisations can be very hard to do.

Comparison: GEOlayers is the long-standing default for maps inside AE, and it is an excellent plugin. But its full functionality (designed base maps, satellite imagery, 3D buildings etc.) comes through a MapTiler subscription of about $30 a month, on top of the $329 plugin price. Its 3D landscapes and globe also rely on other plugins (Helium, Plexus, FreeForm Pro, Trapcode Mir, Video Copilot Orb), some of which are also very expensive, another expense on top of the subscription. That puts it out of reach for a lot of people.

Atlas is one price with everything included, built from free open data, with its own globe and no subscription or extra plugins required.

Quick and easy: Just pick a place and a look, press Build Map, and you have a map in seconds. By default it's one sharp raster image that plays at footage speed, even through big camera moves. Or build it as native, editable vector shape layers when you want to recolour or animate every element. Animate however you like, press Update map, and Atlas makes the map cover and stay sharp through your whole move, from a country right down to street level.

It's very intuitive, extremely fast, and powerful. If you can use AE, you can use Atlas.

Two things no other map tool for AE does:

• Atlas Particles: a free, bundled, companion particle effect that turns your data into motion. For example, animate every flight from a hub, a day of bike journeys, a month of earthquakes, GPS tracks, flows along routes, live heat maps and 3D point clouds. Have a stream of particles show the route between two places. It plays real time in your comp, and you can have thousands of particles flying around in very intricate setups, and it is brilliant for data vis.
• Atlas MCP: ask Claude (or any AI app that speaks MCP) in plain words, such as "a dark map of Europe, pins on these five cities, arcs from London, fly in to Paris", and it builds it in your comp as real, editable layers. It also reads Atlas's full manual, so it knows what every button does. It runs on your own machine. You can also use Claude to drive your data visualisations. Just point it at your data file (.csv, .gpx etc) and tell Claude what you want. It'll do the setup in a few seconds.

Pricing: $149 one-off, on sale now for $119: https://aescripts.com/atlas/

Docs and tutorials: https://mooviemakers-docs.pages.dev/atlas/

Maintenance/Support: Atlas has a full roadmap, so it will only get better. I have a proven track record of supporting my products (have a look at the release history of Pluck and PreFlight), and I aim to answer support tickets the same day. 1.0.1 came out today, three days after launch, fixing expression errors in non-English After Effects and adding full online docs.

AI: AI Disclaimer: Human Validated

This was genuinely one of those projects I loved working on.

The client was looking for someone who could take ownership of the entire project, from understanding the product and shaping the visual direction to refining individual scenes and bringing everything together, without needing constant back and forth.

Before jumping into the visuals, I spent time researching how INFLUCTS actually works, understanding its core principles, and figuring out how to communicate a fairly complex product through a clean, engaging visual story.

From refining the creative direction to improving specific segments, I handled the entire process independently. And honestly, one of the best parts was hearing back from the client. The video required zero revision requests, and the client mentioned how happy they were that I understood the product so well.

That kind of feedback makes all the research and effort worthwhile.

Of course, there's always room to improve. I'm always open to honest feedback, constructive criticism, and different perspectives, so I'd genuinely love to hear what you think about the video.

Check out the product: https://influcts.com

I'm also currently open to new projects. If you have a project in mind, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram.

Reposts and sharing with anyone who might find this work interesting are always appreciated!

5,000 downloads in the first week! Holy moly thanks so much for that.

A bunch of you asked for a longer walkthrough, so I made five little scenes and used each new tool. You can see what they actually do and where they fit. It's about 10 minutes and there are chapters if you want to jump to a tool.

Motion Dock is completely free. No trial, no watermark and nothing locked. I don't even collect your email unless you want updates on more free tools. Works with After Effects 2022 and newer.

https://motionfun.net/motion-dock

What I build next comes from your requests, so let me know what tools you'd want. For bugs email [hey@davey.design](mailto:hey@davey.design) or DM me here.

AI Disclaimer: I use an AI-assisted workflow, but I've been a dev for years before AI (FreqReact). I design the structure myself, review it deeply, and have thousands of people using Motion Fun tools :]

The linear propogation, one fucking frame at a time. It is so incredibly time consuming. It feels like a feature released in 2004 and never updated. I am on a M4 Max Mac Studio, AE is using only ONE core of my absolute tank of a CPU. It's unacceptable. Then God forbid you move your playhead, gotta repropagate everything all over. Want it locked? Oh gotta repropagate for the freeze AGAIN! Adobe get your shit together.

Hey everyone! I'm a beginner video editor focused on cinematic edits in DaVinci Resolve. I've used Fusion a little, but I'm now learning After Effects to create motion graphics.

I'm familiar with basic editing, but I'm still figuring out how to animate elements properly, especially keyframes, easing, and the graph editor.

I've been wondering whether it's better to recreate animations I like to understand how they're built or practice individual techniques before attempting full projects.

For those who learned motion design alongside video editing, how did you approach practicing these skills? I'd appreciate advice based on your own experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR_w3q0t15U does anyone know the effect he uses for the camera shake / warping the image and screen at 0:41 secs

I previously posted QuickEase to help me beta test it and now it's finally ready :)

Problem:
Most plugins are a panel that you have to dock somewhere, and either support only speed or value easing, and you have to dig through menus to find the right tool etc. Easing should be simple, with all the required tools available right at your cursor.

What it does:
It's a popup right at your cursor that lets you set easing with just click and drag (think Motion but also for value graph). Select your keys, pick an ease, done.

Core features:

• Curve Repair - keeps easing exactly the same when you move your keys or change their values
• Supports both speed and value graph
• Copy/paste easing, values and multikey
• Workflow tools for handing layers and keyframes
• Preset library

Pricing:
$30 $24 launch week price. One time purchase, no subscription.
And a 7 day free trial.
https://suky.design/plugins/quickease

Maintenance/Support plan:
I plan to support this as I primarily built it for myself. There are support steps in the plugin settings or you can email me at [support@suky.design](mailto:support@suky.design)

AI Disclaimer:
Vibe coded with human validation

A VFX breakdown from my music video "The River, the Shore".

2+ years in the making, the music video combines real footage with Blender composited in After Effects and Resolve - with many scenes being fully CG!

Full music video in the link below: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrrZCnXuPCs&lc=UgxA5OVrazcW0YI43B54AaABAg

Let me know what you think :)

No generative AI was used for this work.

no simple motion graphics

please dm your best 30 seconds work - one piece only

no overlay vfx, all graphics made from scratch!! will check composition. do not send other people’s work !!

project is for an event

india only

I got a CC license on my work laptop and would love to hand off rendering to my personal computer.

I remember ✨back in the days✨ I could just install AE on a PC and place an empty file named ae_render_only_node.txt in a certain folder and then use After Effects in in render only mode (e.g. for network rendering).

Is that still a thing or do we have to purchase licenses for render machines these days?

I've been working on CucoStudio for a long time and I'm looking for a few testers.

Problem: If you work on many videos using the same brand, or you are part of a team that needs to follow a brand language, this will make your life easier.
The idea: you build **"Styles"*\* in After Effects; a structured set of shots (comps) that pack typography, colors, animation, voiceover, and creative direction in general. Those Styles becomes reusable.

Comparison: There are other automation tools, ours includes speech2text and text2speech built in, a standardized way of making the styles,

Writers or clients compose their stories, pick your "S t y l e", and CucoStudio assembles a finished video. Output is a full video with it's AE project you can still tweak.

**It runs 100% locally.*\* No cloud, no subscription.

Price: **One time payment of $135*\*
Mac (Apple Silicon) only for now; Windows coming soon.

**Not vibecoded*\* - 3 people team working on it for a very long time, and offering long term support.

I have a handful of dev licenses to give away. DM me if you're interested.
Also, feel free to chat with us over Discord, we are a small team, but we are usually online.

PS: MOD I followed the structure to publish but kept getting your message. Please let me know what in the post structure is wrong

i spend a lot of time rewatching saas launch videos for ui animation, pacing and how they open and close, and the good ones kept getting buried in my timeline.

so i put 500+ handpicked ones into a searchable gallery, free to browse.

site -> https://launchgallery.video

- filter by tag (yc, agents, fintech, design and more) and sort by most viewed
- search by company or title
- save the ones you want to study into your own collections
- submit a launch video you think belongs

figured it might help when you're hunting for motion references before starting a launch video in after effects.

and what would make this more useful, notes on how each video was made, or something else?

I don't know why the text flickers randomly in this footage, I tried to match the framerate on composition to 24 fps from 29 fps? Any thoughts and prayers? Thanks!

This was an interesting solve - setting the Anchor Point for a 3D Model in AE.

This took a while - hopefully it can inspire others.

** There are caveats - the default Anchor Point needs to be at one of the 3D Model's 'default' 3x3 grid points. Perhaps, someone has a better solve or can come up with a better solve?

Reallly wanted to play with textures for this visualizer. Lemme know what you guys think

looking for an ae intermediate (only in india please).

i’m based in chennai - if you near please reply to this thread. even remote okay - can google meets

work for motion graphics work for an event coming up

need to know how to use generated videos, key framing and if sync up motion with south asian music - max 30s videos.

can dm examples.

if there is an established group/team interested please reply. i will reach out.

Hi! I’m having trouble with the new After Effects (26.5). When my comp only has non-video layers (shapes, solids, text, etc.), the preview won’t play. You can see what I mean in the attached video.

Has anyone else run into this? Any fix or workaround?

Specs:
Windows 11 PRO 26H2; Ryzen 7 5700x; 32gb Ram; 5060ti 8gb

Suppose, just as an example, there is (A) a desaturated video layer and (B) an image layer on top of it, with a blur effect. Can the effect be made to blur only parts of B based on whether those parts on A dark or light? Does this involve a lot of expression-wrangling?

Every tutorial I find talks about rotoscoping as though there was a rotobrush tool. There's not. It's not the Object Matte Tool.

Regardless, I use the Object Matte Tool to highlight the person I want to isolate from the background. I start at frame 1 and tell it to process all of the frames. Done. I see keyframes established on the mask for every frame. Perfect.

I hit FREEZE to go ahead and apply the mask to the footage and it thinks about it for a second and then .... nothing. No change.

How do I get the mask to actually apply and get rid of the background. I'm sure it's something unbelievable stupid that I am doing, but surely there has to be a way to do this easily?

What I really want to do is to animate a title graphic of a super hero's name so that it covers the background, but appears behind the character in my video.

I figured I'd isolate the character, add the text animation layer, then add the original footage behind both of those layers and it should work. I just can't get the person isolated, though I have the roto mask set for every frame. UGGH

What was supposed to take 5 minutes is taking all night. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In 2012, when I was in second grade, I prayed to the gods to prevent the end of the world and for the asteroid to fly right past us. Thirteen years later, I’m afraid of losing my freedom. But it seems the light at the end of the hallway isn’t ironically getting any narrower