14 amazing After Effects plugins

(Image credit: Adobe / Future)

The best After Effects plugins can transform the way you work with Adobe's leading motion graphic and compositing software. Whether you're a graphic and motion designer, animator or 3D artist, there's a plugin that can help speed up your workflow, boost your creativity, or both.

As we note in our After Effects review, Adobe's software is already powerful and feature-rich. And a quick glance at the best After Effects tutorials will reveal just how much you can do with it, out of the box. But like with many programs, it can be improved and made more efficient through the use of third-party tools. So in this article, we've collected together the best After Effects plugins, as recommended by experienced designers and animators contributing to Creative Bloq.

We've included both paid-for and free After Effects plugins. Some add features that don’t exist in the core application, others simply make stuff look cool and some can help you do things faster and smarter. If you don't yet have the software, then don't miss our guide on how to download Adobe After Effects free or with Creative Cloud. In the meantime, here's our pick of the best After Effects plugins.

Video Copilot's Orb offers a range of unique tools to make planetary creation easily. It uses a similar 3D engine to the developer's excellent Element 3D plugin. While it won't work for every planetary shot, Orb will work for 90 per cent of them and is an invaluable tool for previs. This is especially so when combined with other After Effects plugins, or mixed with a 3D camera from a 3D application, which can be imported into After Effects along with foreground plates for objects such as spaceships.

While After Effects does offer pretty good tracking tools (including the bundled Mocha AE plugin from Boris FX), if you're after something more advanced, it's worth upgrading to the feature-rich Mocha Pro. This powerful, versatile plugin supports both After Effects and Premiere. It's built on Academy Award-winning planar tracking, and can easily handle even the most challenging tracking, masking and stabilisation projects.

Animation Composer is a free After Effects plugin from Mister Horse. Used by more than 100,000 motion designers, it simplifies and speeds up the animation process by providing you with pre-built animation presets and templates, enabling you to create animations quickly, without having to spend a lot of time manually keyframing. It includes over 1,500 animation presets, which cover a range of animation styles, such as text animation, shape animation, character animation, and more. You'll also find tools for working with 3D layers, camera movements, and transitions.

DOF PRO (Depth Of Field Generator PRO) is a depth-of-field generation plugin for After Effects. Backed by over a decade of research and development since its first release in 2005, it's become the industry’s professional choice for crafting sophisticated depth of field effects, quickly and efficiently, as a post process. Its state-of-the-art features provide innovative and cutting-edge technology not available elsewhere, resulting in one of the most powerful and advanced depth of field processors in the industry.

Advanced features include support for chromatic and achromatic aberration; focal plane bokeh differentiation; astigmatism and vignetting effects; support for custom aperture maps; and noise recovery. There is also full alpha channel/transparency support, 32-bit floating-point colour support, accurate aperture display and an iris array display. You can see a feature breakdown here comparing the plugin to After Effects’ Camera Lens Blur effect.

A bit of glitch in your video can be a beautiful thing, and here's a straightforward way to get it. By dropping I-frames and duplicating delta frames, Datamosh can create the sort of surreal, messy effects that you normally only see in corrupted video files. And while you'd normally have to break out a hex editor to create these effects, Datamosh enables you to do it within After Effects at the touch of a button and with a lot more control.

Plexus from Rowbyte Software has become one of the few plugins that has become synonymous with a certain look: everyone knows what to expect when a brief asks for the Plexus effect. The fact is, with some manipulation Plexus is capable of so much more than dots and lines. This is even more true of Version 3, which comes with even more effects and enhancements. My favourite is the Plexus Object Panel, which offers an easy way to manage the Plexus scene – something I would love to see in other complex After Effects plugins.

Created by Stefan Minning, Normality is a free After Effects plugin that allows you to light 3D objects and scenes directly within After Effects, through the use of normal passes and advanced relighting techniques. The software is production proven and has been used by animation studios around the globe, including CGCG STUDIO.inc, Pendulum, Studio Lampion and Polygon Pictures. And best of all, it's free!

Also from AE Scripts, Volna is an advanced stroke plugin for After Effects with built-in arrows, noise distortion, gradients and blend tool. With it you can draw strokes along a path with a lot of possible styles: taper strokes, points mode, and more. Volna can also blend different paths from two layer masks to create a new shape. This After Effects plugin draws intermediate lines between masks, smoothly blending from one path to another.

Yanobox's Nodes 3 is a plugin for After Effects, Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro and Motion that's capable of creating a huge range of imagery, from advanced 3D UI elements to more abstract elements. All of these can be manipulated and navigated through in 3D space. The only downside to this AE plugin is that there's still no Windows support. However, if you are Mac-based, it's definitely worth checking Nodes out.

Video Copilot has a well-earned reputation as one of the most innovative After Effects plugin creators. However, as many of its plugins come at a not-inconsequential price, it is great to see the company release a plugin that is completely free. Saber is a hugely powerful lighting and effects tools for a wide range of purposes. Not only can it be used to create beams of light (for example… lightsabers), but it also comes with a wide range of presets and the ability to work with layer masks.

If there is one After Effects plugin that's become universally popular among artists and studios, it is Lenscare from Frischluft. It's really two plugins. FL Depth of Field can use depth data from a 3D render to create a realistic depth of field in CG, without the overhead of rendering DoF in CG. With this plugin, the focus point and depth amount is animatable. FL Out of Focus is a quicker version with no depth input. It uses the Frischluft engine to create beautiful lens blurs.

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14 of the best After Effects plugins

The best After Effects plugins

01. Orb

02. Mocha Pro

03. Animation Composer

04. DOF PRO

04. Datamosh 2

05. Plexus 3

06. AE Normality

07. Pixy Halftone

08. PQ FUI Toys 3

09. Volna 2

10. Duik

11. Nodes 3

12. AfterCodecs

13. Saber

14. Lenscare