Best After Effects Plugins for Animators
After Effects is a one stop shop for all things character animation. For all your budding animators out there one of our incredible animators Joanna has collated a list of her current favourite plugins to add those extra useful tools to your workflow. These plugins can make After Effects shine but Joanna advises against new animators relying on them entirely.
Deekay by Motion Design School
Rating: 5/5 Magpies
Deekay is a game changer for character animation and rigging in After Effects. Joanna’s favourite thing about Deekay is how easy it is to make natural looking and moving limbs for your characters. You can easily move limbs wherever you want and move them naturally. There are also some useful additional features too including adding looping expressions or trimming paths in just one click of a button to make your workflow speedy!
Deekay is a paid plugin but Joanna thinks it is well worth it! Our top tip is to keep an eye out on the Motion Design School or sign up to their newsletter as they have sales quite frequently!
Duik by RxLaboratory
Rating: 2.5/5 Magpies
Duik is a character rigging and animation toolkit for After Effects and as Joanna calls it ‘a powerhouse’. Duik has so many functions and capabilities for character animation and could even be used as an overall replacement for many other plugins, but it’s only rated at 2.5 magpies I hear you say. Well, although Duik sounds perfect on paper (I mean it’s even free!), the problems start when you start to add elements of it into your project. In Joanna’s experience, the more Duik elements you add to your project the more your files start to slow down.
Joanna loves the capabilities of Duik from it’s complex rigging to file health indication however, using it in practise can mean for a slow workflow.
Joysticks n’ Sliders by Mike Overbeck
Rating: 5/5 Magpies
This plugin is one of Joanna’s most recent finds but has quickly become one of her favourites. This plugin makes creating, using and editing joysticks so easy. It is ideal for creating more complex motion with your character animation that you might want to reuse. For example, Joanna has found making head rotations for characters using joysticks super simple! The shining star of this plugin is that Joanna has found it doesn’t slow your files down which makes workflow quick and easy.
Joysticks n’ Sliders is another paid plugin but for the price Joanna thinks this is 100% worth the purchase. The creator also makes regular updates to the plugin and publishes tutorials on how to use it to its best ability.
Motion Tools Pro by Motion Design School
Rating: 4/5 Magpies
Motion Tools Pro is full of lots of cool tools that Joanna wishes were standard in the After Effects software! From setting anchor points of any layer to any point in a project with just one click to manipulating elements within shape layers with ease, this plugin is packed with useful tools. One of Joanna’s favourite offerings from Motion Tools Pro is un-precomposing, a tool she describes as life-changing for After Effects users. Normally undoing precomposing is difficult and unpredictable but with this handy tool everything is kept the same and in the same place to make your life easy and your workflow smooth!
The only reason this plugin is rated 4 magpies instead of the full bill of 5 is Joanna thinks the previous version of Motion Tools Pro was clearer to use than the current version. However, the current version is now free so every cloud eh?
We hope these recommendations can help make your After Effects projects smoother, quicker, easier and overall more fun!
Eve McIntyre is a writer Steel Magpie.