James Whiffin Dives Into the Adobe After Effects SDK for Writing Ae Plugins.

After Effects has a robust SDK and scripting environment, and while a tutorial on how to create native plugins for After Effects might be a little out of the average Ae-user’s league, it’s still interesting to watch how the sausage gets made when it comes to Ae plugins. Watch Plugin Everything’s James Whiffin dive into the After Effects SDK and create a simple line drawing plug.

Whiffin starts with some code from Bresenham’s line algorithm, that will draw a simple line. The tutorial works with Visual Studio, but the same source code can work with Xcode on MacOS systems.

As their name would suggest, Plugin Everything seems to be hell-bent on actually creating native plugins for After Effects that help with everyday motion graphics workflow tasks. Their latest is Bezier Node, that lets you draw a curved line between two elements.

1 comment

  1. James Smith

    Great tutorial, really hard to find well recorded examples for the SDK! Will you be doing any more? Many of us are good with scripting/expressions but sadly no matter how efficient our code is, AE slows down too much for advanced rigging.

    Apparently it’s not easy/possible to create a plug-in that outputs values in the UI? A simple example would be a UI with 3 points A, B, C whereby point C is continually calculated as the midpoint between A and B. This can be done very easily with expressions but slows down when a scene becomes very complex.

    If it’s at all possible, please could you create a tutorial to show the manipulation and output of data via the UI.

    Kind regards

    -1

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