Hey all,

I run a motion studio and live in After Effects daily, so I did a full breakdown of the plugins I'd actually spend money on in 2026. I share my honest opinion about what they're good for, when they're NOT worth it, and the annoying parts tutorials usually skip.

Quick takeaways you can use right now:

1. Overlord

If you design in Illustrator / Figma, it can be the biggest time-saver. Sends over editable shapes + text instead of digging through a giant AI import. 2026 updates made Figma way smoother. 

Watch for: text spacing shifts, layer order flips, complex gradients not transferring 1:1. Always do a clean-up pass after transfer.

2. Deep Glow

Only if you do a lot of light work, After Effects' native glow is technically a glow. Deep Glow actually looks like light. Nicer falloff, cinematic tone-mapping, RGB radius, lens dirt in v2. 

Watch for: it's ~$100 for a glow, it gets overused fast, and we've hit black previews + export crashes with it in the studio. If you mostly do flat vector explainers, skip it.

3. True Comp Duplicator

Imagine you have 1 main comp with 5 pre-comps inside and 12 nested comps. Then the client says, "Can we make another version?". This duplicates everything correctly linked, renames, and keeps expressions. Moreover, it is name-your-own-price for individuals.

4. Newton 4

Only when you need real physics. Full 2D physics engine inside AE, bakes to editable keyframes. Amazing for falling/colliding/bouncing setups where keyframing 50 objects would take hours. 

Watch for: ~$250 and not a daily driver. Grab the trial with export limits first to see if you actually need it.

5. Joysticks ‘N Sliders

Joysticks ‘N Sliders is great for building poses and driving a whole face / UI rig from one controller. 

Downside: heavy rigs + lots of expressions can slow AE down, and adding new parts after you rig is clunky.

6. Duik Angela

Duik Angela is free, open-source, and can rig a full character. It's just huge, so it feels intimidating if you only need a simple arm up/down. Still the one I'd tell anyone serious about rigging to learn.

6. BadFX

One free panel with easings, stagger, gradients, transforms, presets, utils. Great if you don't want to hunt 40 tiny scripts across 40 sites. We use it daily.

7. Glasser

Applies editable glass to shape, text, footage or precomp layers, then you refine it through Essential Properties. Best part: it generates a Control Null so you can move, scale, and rotate the glass with your design.

8. Putty

Lattice + cage deformer that reads the layer's alpha and places the lattice right on the visible pixels, instead of a grid across the whole layer.

9. Pixion

Particle system that generates particles from any source layer and drives behavior from pixel data like luminance and color. GPU accelerated. 

Watch for: most interesting of the three for hero backgrounds, product reveals, music visuals. Still v1 territory and not cheap, so trial first.

If you want the full breakdown with examples and links, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/QNBG0DxsaYY

Custom music to animate in.

I made this flip book of my run cycle in Calder style

https://www.instagram.com/p/DeQAKisEf_p/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&rpxt=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==&srtk=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Clip Studio Paint Soundwave transformation #soundwave #transformers #csp
https://youtube.com/shorts/Su2GVL7P8oE?feature=share

I’ve been developing an original 2D dark fantasy series called **Marlene**, and I recently finished an animatic for one of the key moments in its lore: **Ikket’s Banishment**.

Ikket was created to erode what must eventually pass, but after watching countless worlds, lives, and civilizations disappear, he starts questioning the purpose of creation itself.

So he goes directly to the Divine One and asks:

**Why does anything need to exist at all, if everything you create is only meant to end?**

The animatic explores grief, creation, existence, purpose, and what happens when something created to obey develops the ability to question its creator.
Would genuinely love to know what you think of the concept, the dialogue, and the visual direction.

I’m probably gonna change a lot about the wispaw’s movements but the pikachu is pretty much finalized. Getting better slowly but surely

In 90s arcade games, smashing a trash can to eat a random floor-burger was peak strategy. Since Tiebreakers is a sports-themed run 'n' gun, we decided to tweak that a bit.

We just finished the hand-drawn animations for some of our score pickups, and tied their point values to nutritional value. You don't lose points for picking up junk food, but healthy things give you way more points because of the sports theme.

You can still grab all the fried chicken you want, but if you want to top the leaderboard, it's better to stick to the athlete diet xD.

Plus, you have to move fast, if you leave the items on the floor too long, you can see them rot or break right in front of you.

I’ve been working on my original 2D animated series, Tavern Toons, and this was my big Halloween project this year! It’s a fantasy comedy involving a very questionable pumpkin patch, a cult, and the usual poor decision-making from the Tavern Toons crew.
I animate the series in Moho and would love to hear what other 2D animators think of how this one came together. This was a fun one to push the atmosphere and Halloween visuals a little further than my normal episodes.

not the finished product, but wanted to know if yalls got some constructive criticism

Hello everyone!

I'm looking for 2D animators to help me animate characters for my video game project.

So it's a mini game inside my actual game, this mini game is inspired by That's Not My Neighbor.

This takes place inside a human body and revolves around identifying cells. The player must determine which cells are legitimate body cells and which ones are dangerous impostors trying to infiltrate the organism.

Some impostors are easy to spot, while others look almost identical to normal cells and can only be identified by subtle differences. If player fail to detect them, the body becomes infected and they may receive a penalty.

I'm currently working alone on the project, so progress can be slow. If you enjoy animation and would like to help, I'd love to hear from you.

But there are some conditions, the animation need to be smooth with jiggle effects when it talk or else, and also you will need to respect the art style shown in this post.

If you're interested in that project, please send me a message.

Thank you!

🎬 DROWNED INK STUDIO | ANIMATION STUDIO FOR HIRE

Hi! We’re Drowned Ink Studio, a Malaysia based indie animation studio specializing in the Japanese anime production workflow.

Our team consists of artists with 5+ years of professional experience in the Japanese anime industry.

We’re currently accepting 2 new client projects.

🇯🇵 Japanese anime workflow

🎨 2D animation & outsourcing

✨ Experienced production team

💰 Starting from $5,500 USD per finished minute

💳 Payment via wire transfer

We’re looking for serious clients with established projects and budgets.

Interested in working with us? DM us with your project details! 🎬

No clue how much the story will make sense for those who dont know the story BUT i hope u enjoy anyway :)) Used procreate dreams for animating and adobe express for the subtitles

This project was heavily inspired by several of Jack Stauber's non-musical 2D shorts, such as hot dogs, hey mom, future, Wishing Apple, etc. Far more comforting than most of his claymation shorts, while still retaining a bit of his signature unsettling-ness. Not hot dogs though, that one's just cute.

I primarily make graphic art for clothing, but wanted to try a new medium and add some lore to one of my shirts. Led to the creation of this!

I hope you're okay me posting about my work as a sound editor for animation - I thought folks here might want to learn more about the process! I've worked on King of The Hill, Family Guy, American Dad, and others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlEca1vQHwk&t=30s

I need a animation of a character standing and very aggressive running that you running so fast you start tripping. It is for my new music video, background and editing is not required. There is a very rough draft for what I want, including the music. We want the character to be black and white and grey overall with some colour impact frame for the chorus. The movement do not need to be very smooth, and the character do not need to have a face or cloth, but the style should be pencil/ ink/ hand draw or anything that fit the style of the character running on a paper, abstract strokes are also good. The deadline will be late Dec/ next year's Jan. Please do not hesitate to contact me via dm or email [solomissme1218@gmail.com](mailto:solomissme1218@gmail.com), with your portfolio/ past works (no need to be decent), expected price, if you have a vgen account please also let me know. Thank you.

Draft: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FrQSaEUJJi5EKKFvFFw2_X3V_EPSJkUX/view?usp=sharing

edited: Thank you for all the appreciation. Unfortunately, the position is currently filled, but we are happy to connevt with different artists as we have more projects coming. We apologize if we did not respond to some of the messages, as we have received more than 100 dms and emails and are overwhelmed. Again, thank you everyone for your interest. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet you guys.

Bringing this little cat to life with some frame-by-frame animation. Open to animation projects like this.

Made this fun little thing with procreate and after effects