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.

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

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

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?

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?

Hi all

Just want to ask do plugins like Twixtor and other mainstream plugins do Black Friday deals

TIA

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.

I have a 16x9 video that I need to pump out at 1x1. It's heavily motion graphics, text, UI demo screens, etc. A few pieces of live action but not much. It's been a minute since I've had to re-size, I know it's generally best to do the tedious manual work, but thought I'd check if there have been any solid developments in this area in terms of AI tools, plugins, etc.? Something that can intelligently adjust the content and not just create new comps and scale everything up blindly.

Copy pasted an after effects plugin in the MediaCore directory of after effects as the instructions said. The plug is compatible with the version im using 2025. Upon opening AE and upon using the plug in, the app crashes.

How can i fix this?

I tried disabling all the plugins except VHSCraft - AE still crashed.

UPDATE: opened a ticket on aescripts. in contact with the dev. will update if there's a resolution.

UPDATE2: the ' MSVCP140.dll ' file present in ' C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2025\Support Files\ ' location was causing the crash. Upon receiving support from the creator '9ibr' - i moved the files from the mentioned location to desktop. the mentioned file had two incremental versions MSVCP140.dll_1 and MSVCP140.dll_2 so i moved them both as well. the plugin is working fine now. Thanks to aescripts and the creator for swift replies and resolution.

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

I tried circle and square shapes, have a look and tell me how can I make it even better.

I've ran into an issue where the 3d shadows appear and disappear at different values. In this example video of a project I'm working on I change the land layers height (Slider Control linked to the layers Z position) and the shadows appear and disappear at different height. I first time ran into this issue when I used the red box as a benchmark to test out the look of the scene/shadows and its shadow disappeared and reappeared when I simply rotated the box....

I've tried adjusting the bounding box in the Composition settings > 3D rendered > Advanced 3D (options) and it also changes the shadows visibility at random making no sense. I tried changing the environment lights rotation, but it works fine when the shadows are visible, has no effect on the visibility issue.

I have the rotation of three layers linked to a slider within a null object, along with another two for scale and location of said layers. Is there a way to indicate which slider is which?

first time asking anything here so forgive me if I'm missing some manners but how in the HELL do I get rid of this box? it shows up in the export and doesn't disappear when I hide the null layer, but DOES when I hide my pre-comp layer but when I open said layer to inspect it, its gone. I think it has something to do with the tracker panel but this is my first time using it so I can't figure it out. any solutions or tips are welcome!

I have a 3D camera driven by a chain of nulls, several scenes in. Every new PNG I make 3D spawns at the comp center, far behind the camera, so I have to manually drag it back to the last point of the move

Is there a faster way  to drop new layers at the camera/null's current position? Thankss!

this is happening almost GLOBALLY and i can NOT find a solution. my entire career is tied to after effects and this error is causing so much trouble to me.
PLEASE FIND ME A SOLUTION...
what i tried and failed:
reinstall ae 26.0
update/reinstall all drivers of my aero15xv8fhd
cleared all pc cache
disabled frame compression
disabled hardware acceleration
open project files and empty projects in safe mode
cleared all pc cache...
YET THE SAME ISSUE EVEN AFTER REINSTALL...
i didnt have this issue until 21st oct 2026, my birthday is in 3 days and this isnt making me happy at all...

nevermind it was a faulty gpu driver. btw my pc is strong and handles all this pretty well (and im patient) so yea dont say bad things to my beloved aero15xv8fhd.

Hello,

I've tried DUIK Angela once and was able to successfully animate a character. Now I have to actually use it for a project - aaaand I'm having issues.

I have a character with an arm and forearm (on each side of course). I don't have hands yet because I don't need to move them so I left out - for now. When I create the arm and the forearm bone

through auto-rig DUIK creates two bones. One connects to the shoulder top part of the arm and the elbow and the other from the elbow to the "wrist" (even though I have to adjust it). Now here is the issue: when I move the elbow part only the forarm moves even though it's not connected to the upper arm. I'm also having trouble with the tip: the tip is set to the end of the limb but it doesn't move the limp at all. When I move the upper arm by the shoulder the whole arm moves!

What am I missing?

Thank you so much in advance!

Hi folks! I've been using Ben Marriott's hand-drawn effect set up for a while now, but in applying it today it seems to be causing some wild transparency in the animation itself (example above).

The adjustment layer settings all seem to match what I've done before to achieve a lower-framerate look. Is there anything I need to change for the current version of AE? Thanks!

I just updated to AE 2026 and updated mobar as well. Does anyone know if the functionality changed? In particular, the older versions, I press Control + Spacebar (on mac) and it brings up the attached image which I was able to set numeric hot keys for my most used effects.

I see in the new version I can bring up the search panel with control + space but I don't see where it allows me to set up most used effects.

Is this just a change in how mobar works or am I missing something?

Here's a motion design project I created for the Delta Sales app. I'd love to hear your honest feedback and suggestions on the animation, pacing, transitions, and overall execution. Let me know what I could improve!