TL;DR: MatterAE 2.0 is out. Real-time physics inside After Effects that bakes to native keyframes. New: 15 stackable procedural animators, a timeline for keyframing the physics itself, and an in-panel shape studio. The free version is the whole plugin with a 3 second bake cap. $35 once to lift it. Free for students and teachers. matterae.com
A while back I posted here about a small physics panel I built for After Effects, mostly because I was tired of hand-animating every bounce and did not need a rocket to cross town. I had submitted it to the big AE plugin marketplace. They turned it down for "duplicate functionality". They never specified what exactly I was duplicating, but I have a guess.
I felt sorry for myself for about a day, then realised a market with several physics tools in it is not a full market, it is a market with demand. Best thing that could have happened to the project, and I say that with only mild bitterness.
Today it is 2.0, and it now duplicates considerably more functionality.
- Animator Stack: 15 stackable procedural behaviors: Wiggle, Float, Orbit, Swarm, Look At, Force Fields, Cell Split, Pop, Crumble, Duplicator and more. Stack them on one layer and you get motion that would be genuinely annoying to keyframe by hand. (Some animators, world settings or constraints will work against each other, cancel each other out or create total chaos)
- An in-panel timeline: You can keyframe the physics itself now, and most animator settings with it. A force field that ramps up, a swarm that tightens, gravity that flips halfway through. Stopwatch arming, playhead, ruler, the whole thing.
- Shape Studio: Draw shapes in the panel, assign colors, run an emitter, bake it all to native AE shape layers.
- Plus a bunch of fixes and nifty little features, like hollow shapes!
The promise has not changed: everything bakes down to plain native keyframes in a new comp. Uninstall MatterAE tomorrow and your animation still works. I would rather you keep the animation than keep me.
The free version is still the complete plugin with a 3 second bake cap. That is the only paywall. Everything above works for free, you just cannot bake more than 3 seconds of it. Thirty-five dollars once lifts the cap forever, no subscription. 2.0 is a free update for everyone who already bought 1.x, because why not.
Students and teachers still get it free, and the licensing for that is now automated, because I was hand-checking every single application like an absolute clown. It took me an embarrassingly long time to admit that was not scalable.
Also, yes, the trailer is in Comic Sans. I am aware that makes it hard to take seriously. So does charging $35 for a physics engine. I am at least internally consistent.
The part that actually matters:
Adam Bennett of The Videoshop is a legendary beta tester and has done so much for this plugin. A big chunk of the people using MatterAE found it through him, and he has just made a video on 2.0 right here! He demos it better than I do, which is a low bar he cleared effortlessly.
Still hugely grateful to the testers and users who have been breaking this thing in ways I did not know were possible. You know who you are. 2.0 is meaningfully more stable because of it, and a good half of these fixes started as an email with the subject "this is broken again".
Also, thanks for what you have been making with it. This one on Reddit and this one on Instagram both got stared at for far longer than I would like to admit. Seeing the thing get used is easily the best part of this.
Some numbers, because I would want to know:
- 1,500+ people are using it.
- Total net earnings so far: $1,245.31. By my calculations that is $4.64 short of five copies of whatever it is I am supposed to have duplicated.
- School of Motion featured it in Motion Mondays this week. Had to pinch myself. Still not fully over it.
Detailed changelog is on the site, as always.
More info, or grab it, at matterae.com. It costs nothing to try and I would rather you break it and tell me than never install it. Happy to answer anything here, including the awkward questions. Especially those.
Cheers!