!!Epilepsy warning!!

ae+blender

insta-kwertigy

I genuinely cannot understand why Adobe decided to effectively remove the old Roto Brush workflow in After Effects 2026.

Rotobrush 3.0 was finally working beautifully. It was fast, predictable, and most importantly- you could actually see the strokes you were painting. You had direct visual feedback showing exactly what you were telling the tool to include or exclude. That made it possible to perform careful, pixel-specific corrections and understand why the matte was behaving the way it was.

I lead a motion design department at a creative agency, and we rely on rotobrush every single day. Yes, we have Mocha Pro and other tools, but rotobrush had become invaluable for quick-turnaround work. I can't see upgrading my team's software for the foreseeable future as being realistic.

In my experience, many of the people who claimed it was a bad tool were simply using it incorrectly: painting too many strokes, coloring outside the lines, adding background strokes to compensate for poorly placed foreground strokes instead of undoing them, and generally overworking the selection.

The new Quick Selection/Object Matte workflow technically does something similar, but worse.

It is laggier, the selections feel less deliberate, and your strokes disappear into the ether. You drag over an area, wait for it to think, and then hope it understood what you meant. When it works, I’m sure it looks impressive in a 30-second Adobe demo. When it does not, you have less precision, less feedback, and less control than the tool it replaced.

And no, selecting rotobrush 3.0 does not restore the old workflow. It only changes the propagation engine while keeping you trapped inside the new interface. That straight up sucks.

This feels like Adobe optimizing After Effects for casual social-media editors who want to click once and remove a background for a TikTok fancam, while actively making the tool worse for professional users who need to refine difficult mattes across hundreds of frames. That is especially frustrating because the casual users Adobe seems so desperate to court are probably not the people paying for full Creative Cloud subscriptions in the first place.

Yes, professional users have access to other, more precise roto tools. But none of them filled the same role as Roto Brush 3.0: fast, efficient, controllable roto for tight deadlines.

Why couldn’t Object Matte simply exist alongside Classic Roto Brush?

Keep the one-click AI tool for people who want it. Keep the mature, stroke-based tool for people who need precision. There was absolutely no reason to delete a working professional interaction model just because “AI selection” looks more exciting in marketing material.

DOF PRO (Depth Of Field Generator PRO), the world's most sophisticated depth of field plugin for After Effects, is now supercharged with native CUDA-supported GPU acceleration! Experience an unprecedented leap in rendering efficiency with completely new GPU capabilities coded from the ground up. In benchmark tests, complex depth-of-field calculations that previously bogged creative workflows to a halt at 39 seconds per frame on the CPU now blaze through in a staggering 2.28 seconds per frame on the GPU. That is a massive 17x speedup—delivering over a 1,600% increase in rendering performance.

In another test, with a state-of-the-art Threadripper 3970X CPU capable of pushing the same depth of field settings at a mere 3.25 seconds, the GTX 1080 Ti GPU (now considered an older GPU) rendered the same frame in 0.388 seconds - literally in a fraction of a second. That is a whopping 8x speedup - delivering over a 700% increase in rendering performance.

Newer Nvidia GPU's such as the 4000 and 5000 lineup will produce even faster results.

By offloading heavy processing to the GPU, DOF PRO turns grueling render times into near-instantaneous feedback, allowing you to iterate faster, refine your cinematic visuals flawlessly, and keep your creative momentum entirely unbroken.

DOF PRO v2.0 now features preservative highlights, which intelligently redistribute brightness across out-of-focus areas to maintain your source image’s true exposure and tonal balance. Unlike traditional additive highlights which simply blend light values on top of one another, quickly clipping details, introducing harsh optical artifacts, and blowing out bright spots into flat, lifeless white, the preservative method conserves the original dynamic range. By preserving hue and luminance relationships within out-of-focus specular highlights, it produces soft, photographically accurate bokeh discs with rich color detail and smooth falloff, preventing overexposure even in intense, high-contrast scenes.

Additional updates include various bug fixes, numerous improvements, optimized custom aperture support, better bokeh spillover across depth map levels, and more.

This is a promotional video for the brand new DOF PRO v2.0 After Effects plugin.

DOF PRO v2.0 Promo Video

Generate state-of-the-art, photorealistic depth of field in After Effects using the world's leading depth of field plugin, now at blazing speeds!

Check it out now at the product page here: https://richardrosenman.com/shop/dof-pro-ae/

So I've got a 360 video of a 3D model shot on white. Looks clean until you try to composite it. The problem: the model has white highlights and interior details (windows, reflective surfaces). The second I key out the white bg, everything white on the model gets nuked too.

What I've thrown at it:

Keylight
Luma Key
Soft masks, core masks,
Nothing. It all keys out together

And the edges are rough as hell. Jittery frame to frame. I've got like 48-100 frames in the sequence so frame-by-frame masking is insane.

There's gotta be an actual solution here. Someone's dealt with this. I can use After Effects or Fusion, doesn't matter. But I need something that actually works!

Here’s a few screenshots from the process , thanks for whoever could contribute! Would love to read or see someone dealing with the same situation! If you saw a tutorial (I couldn’t find)

Here's the code: https://github.com/meszmate/rebound

Hello everyone!

I'm leaving after effects, been at it for a couple weeks.

I'm trying to animate a logo. It's a bowl of soup with a rock partially sticking out of the soup. My idea is to have the rock fall into the bowl, disappear for a second and come back up partially.

I've tried creating a mask on the bowl/soup layer but it doesn't hide the rock.

I also tried creating a mask on the rock layer over the bowl/soup area but it doesn't work either as the mask moves down when the rock moves down also.

I separated the rock and the bowl into different layers.

.First image is the path of the rock falling, it should disappear as it enters the bowl.

.Second foto is the mask I drew on the bowl/soup layer

.third photo is how the end result should look once the rock falls into the bowl and comes floating back up

Any ideas on how I could proceed?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Hey
Looking for advice. How to compose the vinyl placeholder in AE better than it’s now? Or is it already looks good?

Is it better than the previous one? (Although the content is more boring.) https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/s/58KAgJ6G3Z any crits

Hi everyone,

I'm doing a screen replacement on a computer monitor using Mocha AE, and animating a zoom using an AE 3D Camera layer. The track sits perfectly on the screen, but I'm running into a severe resolution issue during the zoom.

As the camera gets closer, the screen insert becomes extremely blurry and pixelated. I even tested footage that already has a physical camera zoom built into it, but tracking it with Mocha still results in a super blurry insert. It seems like After Effects crushes the high-res image down to fit the monitor first, and then stretches those reduced pixels back out during the zoom.

Is there a different standard practice or workflow to handle this without losing quality? Would love to know how this is usually done when dealing with close-ups and zooms.

Thanks!

Saw Fafa Motion doing soft cells in Cavalry and got really curious if something similar could be done inside After Effects. The result is 12 shape layers with path expressions using a Polygon Clipping algorithm called Sutherland–Hodgman (Crazy stuff)

Hey everyone! I’m an After Effects beginner having a tough time tracking noses/faces.

​The default AE point tracker keeps slipping, glitching out, and forcing me to manually adjust keyframes constantly. It’s driving me crazy.

​Could someone explain the workflow for doing this in Mocha AE/Pro instead? I'm used to the standard point tracker, so I'm not entirely sure how to set up Mocha for a facial feature like the nose.

basically I have after effects 2019 (low end PC) my friend have after effects 2023-24 version and I asked him to send me a quality CC, the AF CCs are not backward compatible the file is in .ffx

so can someone please help me to convert it to .aep format from your AF latest version so I can use on my 2019 version? it's just 2 minutes work

Best way to keep your designs available to everyone, with the project sync feature you can now link your whole project to your palette and use the colorblind tool to see how accessible your project is

More info here : https://aescripts.com/pigment/

I've been using AE 3D camera tracking for years, sometimes this is an issue and sometimes it isn't.

How do I prevent the text from jumping up and down? I've tried using different tracking points, I've only adjusted the text through font size, scale (resetting back to 100%, sometimes it is super large and at 400% when I first right click the track points and click "create text) and only move the text around by grabbing the XYZ axis. You can see the shape layer does the same thing (I created this by right clicking tracking points, create null, then make my shape, parent it to null).

The source clip is slowed down, so maybe that's part of the issue, but I know there have been other times I do this effect on clips not slowed down and have a similar issue.

Screenshot of AE in comments.

Thanks for your help. I know there are plenty of tutorials on 3D camera tracking, but I haven't found any that address this issue clearly.

Hello! Im trying to learn how this type of animation is made. My best guess would have to be 2.5D or path animation. Maybe theyve used some preset? I know its not a unique animation or anything.

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Hi all,

I was following this tutorial, and you can see that the guy changed the color of 2 different parts of the text layer while keeping the text layer as one. I was trying to find any tutorial for this but I am unable to for some reason. I just want to separate the words within the text layer IN scene setup, so that I am able to apply different materials to different words that are part of the overall text layer. I do not want to make multiple text layers because animating will become harder, and I just want to keep it as one so that it is most convenient. Thanks so much.

Honestly love this plugin, perfect balance of speed and customization.
if you've ever used the native grain plugin, you know how slow it is.

quick overview video here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTR2ubfrJK4&lc=UgxhiL2eF6Eob58xBe94AaABAg

Product page here
https://elementsupply.co/products/fast-grain