10 Free and ‘Name Your Own Price’ After Effects Scripts
Build up your AE script library! Check out these FREE and ‘name you own price’ After Effects scripts.
Add power to After Effects with scripting. Scripts add additional functionality to AE and can be used to automate and simplify repetitive processes. Whereas expressions can only be applied to a single composition/layer, scripts can handle multiple composition and layers.
For many AE users the ‘code’ aspect of scripting may be a bit intimidating, but luckily there are many existing scripts online that you can quickly integrate into AE. In this post, we’ve rounded up 10 of our favorite FREE After Effects scripts. Note: Some templates in the list are “Name Your Own Price”. If you find them useful be sure to show the author some love!
Want to create your own AE scripts? Check out our previous post: Introduction to After Effects Scripting
1. Decompose Text
Decompose is a cool script that allows users to break up text into individual layers. Instead of having to track and kern individual text layers by hand you can simply layout your text how you want it, activate the script, and you’re done. Decompose also gives users the ability to break up their text by characters, words, or lines. [From aescripts + aeplugins]
2. Ease and Wizz
Ease and Wizz is an extremely useful AE script that helps with interpolation between keyframes. The script uses complex math to ease values between keyframes. Instead of using the graph editor to smooth out your keyframes you can easily use this script to get similar results. Definitely a must-have if you do a lot of motion graphic work. [from aescripts + aeplugins]
3. Auto Crop
While this script may seem a little niche it actually adds a really cool functionality to After Effects – the ability to crop your composition. Now of course you can simply go to the composition settings and crop there, but AutoCrop2 actually automatically crops to the size of the contents in your composition. This is useful if you are working with elements that have a very specific resolution, or if you’re simply trying to save space by not rendering out unused pixels. [from BatchFrame]
4. Move Anchor Point
If you do a lot of motion graphics work in After Effects than you have probably ran into the problem of adjusting your anchor point after you’ve already set keyframes. Normally when you try to do this your position will shift causing you to reset your keyframes. Using this ‘move anchor point’ script you can move the anchor point even after you already set your position keyframes. [from BatchFrame]
5. Paravent
While the Paravent script may seem gimmicky the results are pretty darn stunning. Paravent is an unfolding script that allows users to created folding and unfolding animations with just a few mouse clicks. These unfolding animations also work in 3D space so your lights will effect your scene. [from MotionBoutique]
6. Collage
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what Collage does! As the name implies, Collage is a script that quickly creates collages from selected layers (a major timesaver over doing it by hand). Collage even has a few customization options like border, where you can set your border width based on you composition size. [from MotionBoutique]
7. Content Aware Fill Script
If you’ve ever worked with the content aware feature in Photoshop than you’ll be familiar with how the Content Aware Fill Script works. In short, the script intelligently replaces a selection in your image with pixel data surrounding the selection. So if you had an object that you needed to remove, you can easily get rid of it using content aware. [from MotionBoutique]
8. Duik
If you do animation, Duik is the free script for you. Duik gives animators key features not included in After Effects like inverse kinematics, bones, and auto rigs. While it will take some time to get used to the script, it is incredibly powerful and a must-have for anyone into character animation. [from DuDuF]
9. Dojo Screenshot
The built-in screenshot tool in After Effects is a great way to share your work with others during production. However, the downside is it only creates JPEGs (which do not include alpha channels for compositing tests). To fix this problem you could simply export at PNG or PSD, but an even easier way is to use the Dojo Screenshot Script. The script takes PNG screenshots of your compositions making it easier to test them out with the added alpha channels. [from CreativeDojo]
10. Translate Expressions
If you create templates or projects that are shared worldwide you need to make sure that all of your expressions are language proof. For example, just because your projects expressions work in an English version of After Effects, doesn’t mean they work in a German version. The Translate Expressions script fixes this. Using the script you can be sure that your projects will work in any After Effects language worldwide. [from aescripts + aeplugins]
Technically you can download and install all of these scripts for free, but if you like them why not throw a little money to the author? They deserve it!
Here are a few places where you can find more free AE scripts:
Know of any other awesome free After Effects scripts? Share in the comments below.
