now some of these plugins are the big fancy look at me type effect that will
open up a world of possibilities in your work most are tools that do one
really specific task really well and i guarantee that you'll find at least
something in this video that will improve your workflow in after effects or your money back
now all of these are free some have a name your price option so you can pay what you want
but if you find them useful and you have the means send some dosh their way they're almost all
independent developers and a lot of these tools are better than some of the most popular paid
plugins you'll find links to everything in the description and these are no particular order
until we get to the top four that's when the knights come out ae juice gif lets you in one
click render out a gif of your comp and it's got a fair few useful settings there as well next is
butt capper and this lets you quickly adjust the caps of your stroke if we want rounded caps we can
click the rounded caps icon and if we want rounded corners we hold alt or option and click that icon
again and do the same for modded all bevel caps as well displacer pro this is essentially an upgraded
version of the displacement map effect that lets you not just displace with the x and y position
but with rotation and scale as well and you can also add chromatic aberration as well this is
really cool for a data moshing style glitch effect decomposed text allows you to split up text layers
by word or character into separate layers in one click so you can animate them each individually
create 3d shapes generates common 3d objects in one click pyramids cubes cylinders they're
all here no mucking about reposition anchor point this does exactly what it says on the tin you can
quickly and easily reposition the anchor points of your layers it works on multiple layers too
rd composition setter this allows you to change the composition settings of multiple comps at once
it's really helpful if you need to adjust the frame rate of your whole project or just resize
some comps advanced selection allows you to select multiple layers based on any parameter that you
can think of the layer type the blending mode or even a string of characters in the layer name this
is super useful in complex projects with lots of layers bendy nulls allows you to bend layers using
the cc bend effect but it links the ends to nulls so you can easily reposition your layer without
the effect breaking shape repeater baker this allows you to select any repeater you have on a
shape layer hit bake repeater and will separate them all into separate shapes within that layer
rigged box an effect preset that you can apply to a shape layer and it creates this rectangle
or rigged box and you can adjust all of its properties up here in the effects control panel
without having to toggle down and adjust all of these settings it is great for ui animation the
next is type array it applies custom interpolation to your characters or words using delays or
markers now it's pretty hard to explain concisely but if you work with type animators do check this
out next is sorti this allows you to quickly sort your layers in your layer stack based on
a whole bunch of properties if we want to sort the order of these squares in our timeline by opacity
we can select opacity select ascending hit the play button and now they're all rearranged from
most opaque to least opaque rift now this lets you sequence and move your layers really easily
across your timeline there are a whole bunch of options we can easily put them into a sequence
but also have them ease in on this curve we can even randomize them as well true comp duplicator
this lets you duplicate your entire hierarchy of comps and pre-comps without the need to duplicate
and replace each one here we've got three comps nested within one another but we can select
our top comp adjust any settings we need and hit duplicate selected and that will create duplicates
of those that we can adjust without messing with the original comps highly in now this is a single
button that duplicates the layer you have selected but also links all of the animated properties to
the original so you can make any adjustment to the original layer and it will be duplicated on
the duplicate now we're at the top four and these are the best plugins that money can buy but free
saber by video copilot if you've seen a lightsaber in absolutely anything made in the last five years
chances are it was made with saber you can create energy beams lasers portals neon lights with no
trouble at all and with a ton of customization options and for an honorable mention on this list
what saber does for lightsabers orb does for planets so if you want to make ominous planet
shots check out all from video copilot which is also free next is Duik Bassel 2 by rainbox lab
it is an incredible open source character rigging plugin it can be intimidating at first because of
just how deep it is but it contains pretty much any tool you need to rig any sort of creature you
can imagine doing is what i use to teach character animation in my master motion design course
and if you're new to rigging and just want to get started with something simple i would recommend
limber it is the most simple and intuitive rigging tool that i've used it is paid but worth every
penny and number two on my list is fx console by video copilot now absolutely everybody that has
after effects should have this installed it's essentially a search bar for effects but it is
way more useful than that makes it out to be so with a layer selected we can trigger it with a
shortcut and the search bar pops up or we can search for an effect and simply hit enter to
add it to that layer you can save your favorite effects in the toolbar as well so if i want to
add a fill i can just hit one on my keyboard and it's also really useful for saving a screenshot
of your composition or my favorite technique is to copy it to the clipboard and then just paste
it directly into photoshop now i use this all the time when i'm making my thumbnails but also
for any documents that i need to send to a client and the number one free plugin that i would say
ranks very highly amongst paid plugins as well is ease copy now this is a brilliant plugin that
allows you to copy and paste easing values from your keyframes say you've just animated your
favorite yellow square rotating you spent ages in the graph editor getting the motion curve
just right and now you want to animate its position and scale as well all you need to do is
select your ease keyframes hit copy select your other keyframes and hit paste ease and you are
done that same graph that same motion curve and acceleration is applied to those keyframes as well
now it might seem really basic and it kind of is but it is so useful especially if you want
to add any overlapping action which you can do by simply offsetting these keyframes trust me
it is 10 times more useful than however useful you think it is at the moment i use it so much
i wouldn't be surprised if it showed up on my spotify wrapped now if this is how useful the
free plugins are you can imagine how useful they get once you start exchanging money for them
here's a completely unrelated video of my top 10 paid plugins do with that information or you will