Animation Composer by Mister Horse is a free plugin for After Effects that makes it dead simple to apply powerful and dynamic transitions and effects to layers, quickly and easily. You can achieve results such as overshoot, rubber easing, wobbles, and much more to add nice secondary animations to your projects without the hassle of modifying expressions/keyframes. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the general overview of Animation Composer.
Additional Links:
Animation Composer also works well with existing values and keyframes, so it won’t reset or destroy your current work and will simply apply the transitions and effects on top of your existing animations. All effects are customizable in the Effects Controls panel, so you can tweak everything to your likings. All transition times can be modified by offsetting the layers’ inPoint, outPoint, or markers, making it simple to re-time the effect animations. Animation Composer also comes with a tool to help you shift and offset the timing of effects of multiple layers.
Lastly, you can buy additional effects and transitions at their store to expand the Animation Composer library. They’re extremely affordable and well worth their purchase to support these guys. Animation Composer is an extremely handy plugin, one that every motion designer should have in their toolkit. Let me know what you guys think about Animation Composer in the comments below.
Great tool ! I’m gonna try it as soon as I can !
By the way, the additional links (Long Shadows Preset & Explode Shape Layer Script) are broken… (Error 404).
Definitely a handy tool! Thanks for letting me know about the links, fixed them now 🙂
Thank you very much for sharing such a useful plug in Big thanks and for showing us the tips of how to use it. Is there a way there could be a tutorial with a cool transitions or transitions. Thanks for all.
Thanks for the support Kari! You want a tutorial on cool transitions with Animation Composer? Or without?
wow and this is FREE? i’ll give it a go, i’ve been doing all these animations in my works but always did it manually…each…and….every..SINGLE, one of these animations (not exaggerating), creating scripts to ease my workflow isn’t my forte afterall. being a visual person i can’t stand seeing all that text in scripting either hahahahaha!
Absolutely free, best of luck and hope you enjoy the plugin Henri!
Hey Vinh so i’ve been using the plugin and it works just fine and performs as it’s advertised really well, however I noticed for PC users, if you installed your adobe suite not in the main C: drive it won’t recognise your adobe suite that you have installed, for example it installed the plugin to “Adobe AE CC” which was non-existent. which instead made new folders to match the location it was installing to. I resolved this but just copying the plugin from:
C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe After Effects CCSupport FilesPlug-ins
and placing it in my D: drive where i had my Adobe AE CC 2014 installed.
D:Program Files (x86)AdobeAdobe After Effects CC 2014Support FilesPlug-ins
just giving a heads up 🙂
Hey Vinhson, i downloaded Animation Composer for Windows just to study the expressions, but aparently those are in a rare kind of languge or just hidden in some way…do you know something about it?
The expressions are encrypted the same way my scripts are encrypted to protect sharing source code, so you probably won’t be able to dig into them to learn unfortunately.
I just managed to decompile them…and the expressions are so long and complicated I’ll never be able to understand them. Overshoot Position & Rotate 1 [OS9], for example, is over 550 lines of code.
Hi VinhSohn, I just bought the long shadow preset (a great one), and I have a question regarding that:
It looks like you have the long shadow preset applied to at single layer in your composition – how do you pull that off?
Try using the CC Composite effect 🙂
Thanks 🙂
I’ve looked into CC Composite – I didn’t know about that one. Still don’t get how you did it on one layer, though.
Mr. VinhSon Nguyen, Can tell me ? How can I save After effects CC file for after effects older version like after effects cs4 cs5…………….
You cannot
I’m not quite sure, should be a question for the developers 😀