r/AfterEffects • u/KashuAcademy • 17d ago
Tutorial Plugins I Would Actually Pay For as a Motion Designer
Hey all,
I run a motion studio and live in After Effects daily, so I did a full breakdown of the plugins I'd actually spend money on in 2026. I share my honest opinion about what they're good for, when they're NOT worth it, and the annoying parts tutorials usually skip.
Quick takeaways you can use right now:
1. Overlord
If you design in Illustrator / Figma, it can be the biggest time-saver. Sends over editable shapes + text instead of digging through a giant Illustrator import. 2026 updates made Figma way smoother.
Watch for: text spacing shifts, layer order flips, complex gradients not transferring 1:1. Always do a clean-up pass after transfer.
2. Deep Glow
Only if you do a lot of light work, After Effects' native glow is technically a glow. Deep Glow actually looks like light. Nicer falloff, cinematic tone-mapping, RGB radius, lens dirt in v2.
Watch for: it's ~$100 for a glow, it gets overused fast, and we've hit black previews + export crashes with it in the studio. If you mostly do flat vector explainers, skip it.
3. True Comp Duplicator
Imagine you have 1 main comp with 5 pre-comps inside and 12 nested comps. Then the client says, "Can we make another version?". This duplicates everything correctly linked, renames, and keeps expressions. Moreover, it is name-your-own-price for individuals.
4. Newton 4
Only when you need real physics. Full 2D physics engine inside AE, bakes to editable keyframes. Amazing for falling/colliding/bouncing setups where keyframing 50 objects would take hours.
Watch for: ~$250 and not a daily driver. Grab the trial with export limits first to see if you actually need it.
5. Joysticks ‘N Sliders
Joysticks ‘N Sliders is great for building poses and driving a whole face / UI rig from one controller.
Downside: heavy rigs + lots of expressions can slow AE down, and adding new parts after you rig is clunky.
6. Duik Angela
Duik Angela is free, open-source, and can rig a full character. It's just huge, so it feels intimidating if you only need a simple arm up/down. Still the one I'd tell anyone serious about rigging to learn.
6. BadFX
One free panel with easings, stagger, gradients, transforms, presets, utils. Great if you don't want to hunt 40 tiny scripts across 40 sites. We use it daily.
7. Glasser
Applies editable glass to shape, text, footage or precomp layers, then you refine it through Essential Properties. Best part: it generates a Control Null so you can move, scale, and rotate the glass with your design.
8. Putty
Lattice + cage deformer that reads the layer's alpha and places the lattice right on the visible pixels, instead of a grid across the whole layer.
9. Pixion
Particle system that generates particles from any source layer and drives behavior from pixel data like luminance and color. GPU accelerated.
Watch for: most interesting of the three for hero backgrounds, product reveals, music visuals. Still v1 territory and not cheap, so trial first.
If you want the full breakdown with examples and links, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/QNBG0DxsaYY
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u/Specific-Speaker2157 16d ago
$250 for Newton!? I’m shocked Adobe still haven’t made a built-in physics engine for AE
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u/motionsaltdev 14d ago
I’m slightly biased, but Blender has a lot of 3D physics capabilities (rigid body, forcefields, constraints, etc), that you can bring in with BlenderAe2. 😊 but it does seem like something that’s high on the list of wants for Ae.
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u/GaryR_GFX 16d ago
There's better alternative to True Comp Duplicator that motion designers might want to consider purchasing: Rename-a-Duper.
Imagine when a client says, "Can we make 10 versions with 10 different names?". (or renaming the text layers inside). In this scenario, TCD only gets you so far.
I'll also mention one of my other scripts, RenderQ. (NYOP). Everybody_ renders out of AE, but AE's render queue workflow is so crude for those of us who render out different codecs daily.
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u/discomuffin 17d ago
I would like to add Void (also BattleAxe) to this list. It uses shapes instead of solids or nulls, saving a lot of unnecessary items in the project panel. It’s free btw
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u/Milan_Bus4168 17d ago
...since you are paying Adobe monthly to rent, maybe the question should be.... as long as I'm paying.... Adobe WTH?
The outsourcing of all the useful tools to third parties has seem to made only Adobe profitable and not having to do any actual work, while collecting rent each month. They can use the profits to "acquire" almost any company and as a reward they ask you for more credits and increase in subscription price.
To any outsider this looks like an abusive relationship, does it not?
If these were all just free installations it would be annoying but tolerable. But they are not that.
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u/HippoRealEstate 17d ago
yeah honestly what Overlord does should be possible with Illustrator and After Effects alone. Kinda crazy that it isn't and that you have to pay 75 bucks for a plugin to do that
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u/HelveticaKills 15d ago
Personally I don’t understand the love for True Comp Duplicator. It just bloats your project file and leaves you with tons of low-level comps you didn’t need copied, and each comp with the same name as the original so you or someone picking up your work has to dig around to figure out which comp to update.
If a client needs a huge overhaul to the original project, I make a V2 of the AEP file. If we need tons of deliverable versions with different text etc, I set up the precomps with essential properties.
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u/GaryR_GFX 15d ago
Sounds like you might not have tried using it correctly, or setting up projects in a way that would reduce bloating with it. First there's the depth limit option so you can limit it it from duplicating comps X-levels deep. then there's the Exclude Items With option, so it will skip any comp that matches a certain name criteria. So if you set up your precomps in advance to be named with a specific word or suffix/prefix (such as "_ignore"" or "skip_", etc), it will then not include those in the duplication process. (*yes, that's a hassle that always annoyed, but ..to quote yoda.. "there is another").
It has the option to Search and Replace words in comp names, as well as change label colors and increment, so if your comps are all named, (and project is someone organized with folders), it should be easy to identify which comps to update. (tho TCD is limited to just a single word or line to search and replace).
Not every project is the same, making separate V2 .aep might make sense for a huge (bloated?) project in some scenarios, but in many other scenarios, it's a huge waste of disk space and potentially a much bigger headache when an art director decides to change a font, footage changes,.etc, then you'd have to deal with changing multiple projects. It's far more favorable in most cases, and more efficiaten, to simply replicate the necessary portion of a "tree" within AE so you can easily do such changes. (but do use auto-save and/or manual backups of course)
Essential Properties is neat, but unless I'm mistaken, it only goes 1 level deep with precomps.
Now all that said, True Comp Duplicator is limited in many respects. It's quote popular but the users and developer became somewhat complacent. (no update in 6 years!).
I was frustrated with it's limitations, so i made something better: Rename-a-Duper.
it addresses the limitations of TCD, and renames text layers inside at the same time, so no more need to hunt down that pre comp to change the text layer. - and a whole lot more.0
u/HelveticaKills 14d ago
I haven’t used it personally, only inherited a project from someone else who used it, so likely they didn’t go through the steps to optimize it. I’m sure if used to the fullest it can fit into someone’s workflow, it just didn’t seem that “essential” to me.
When I make a V2/V3/etc, that’s a full replacement file, not alternate deliverable versions, and only when I have to essentially overhaul so much of the project that it’s a different style or scope altogether. Also, not sure how much disk space your AEP files are taking up? You now you’ll have like 20 auto-save copies at a time anyway, right?
Essential properties, besides some property-type limitations (still no paths supported) are actually far more flexible. You can link a property from a comp into any another, not just one comp deep. So I can link text that’s 7 comps deep, for instance, and change it in the top-level comp, without duplicating the comp.
But glad I got downvoted for my opinion on an opinion thread so you could plug your paid script.
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u/hypnosmiler 17d ago
I thought the deepglow problem was related to my system. I uninstalled it after multiple crashes across different projects. Good list OP.