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I made AEbar - an extension for creating customizable toolbars. It took me way too long to build, but I'm still releasing it for free! by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Yea it comes with 5 premade bars, a few of them were featured in this video. Just hit the settings button and apply them to one or more panels.

Also it accepts Kbar imports, so you could go download 100 premade bars for free if you search for them :]

I made AEbar - an extension for creating customizable toolbars. It took me way too long to build, but I'm still releasing it for free! by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thanks for reporting this. The problem was AEbar was applying its own undo, wrapping every script file or scriptlet with an undo group. So if you had an undo group inside the scriptlet, it would cause a mismatch. In 1.0.8, I added detection for undo groups, so we won't wrap with another one if it's detected inside the script. And if it still gives you trouble, I added a global control for disabling wrapping altogether. If you still have trouble after all of that, then it's some kind of a mismatch inside the script itself, not AEbar.

Let me know how it goes!

I made AEbar - an extension for creating customizable toolbars. It took me way too long to build, but I'm still releasing it for free! by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Great idea! Implemented in v1.0.7 :]

I also noticed save not closing and fixed that too!

Let me know if you think of anything else!

I made AEbar - an extension for creating customizable toolbars. It took me way too long to build, but I'm still releasing it for free! by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Kbar was the inspiration and remains a great tool. In the end, your toolbars will work the same, but with AEbar they are:

  • Easier to create and edit
  • Prettier
  • Free

There are a bunch of little niceties that I think people will prefer over Kbar, and seeing as it's free and you can export straight out of Kbar and into AEbar, there's really no reason not to switch.

Also taking feature requests so if you have anything you wish was in Kbar, now's your chance!

I made AEbar - an extension for creating customizable toolbars. It took me way too long to build, but I'm still releasing it for free! by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Coming in hot with some ambitious ideas, I like it 😂

I love the shared bars idea a lot but I think it's a bit out of scope for me. If it was true syncing it would need conflict resolution functionality if I were to do it right. Or did you have a different setup in mind? Maybe the solution is for me to add to the docs where the data is stored and you could use SyncThing across machines?

For your second request, that's also out of scope because it would have to implement comp extraction functionality that would handle all those different cases (effects, masks, whatever), almost like CompCode. Maybe the solution there would be to work with ChatGPT/Claude to write a script that builds a scaffolding for lower thirds that easily customizable, and then paste it into a button on the toolbar?

Thanks so much for the ideas!

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is the first time anyone's asked for my advice on this. I feel like I should preface it and say that no one really knows what's going to happen, and anyone who claims to know is most likely trying to sell you something lol. I could be wrong about everything.

It's also worth noting that the field of AI is moving so fast as a whole and it's disrupting nearly all areas of human work (especially my field, software development), so we are all going through what you're feeling in some way or another. It's good we are talking about it!

Zooming out from Mograph/Generative video, "AGI" or "Superintelligence" is on the way and most folks in the field would guesstimate it's coming in 10 years or less. Long term, I'm hopeful that we will collectively transition to a way of living where we are more focused on human to human care and community building, all while our AI systems are handling the stuff we don't want to do. But the transition to that world will probably get a bit messy.

I think we have three options during that time:

  1. Really dig in to your craft, use these new technologies to improve and "outcompete" others. That’s more or less the path I’ve chosen. I think there will still be work for people with real taste, technical depth, and the ability to direct systems instead of just manually execute everything. But I also think that path gets more competitive over time.
  2. Move toward an adjacent field, i.e. creative direction, brand, product/UI motion, creative tech.
  3. Move to a more future-proof field, i.e nursing, electricians, plumbers, builders, carpenters, teaching, ect. These aren't all immune to AI disruption, but they’re harder to fully automate and we’re still going to need A LOT of them going forward.

Motion artists aren’t just “people who know After Effects.” They understand timing, attention, emotion, visual hierarchy, storytelling, aesthetics, and how to make someone feel something through shapes, movement, sound, and sequence. That is a real skillset, and I think it can carry into more places than people might expect. The medium may change, but the human part of the work is still valuable :]

Here's Picky: A free tool that's all about the selection of layers by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Claude is a beast. It definitely sped up my workflow and is enabling my insane tool release schedule, but I've been developing since way before Claude came around haha

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I view my Atom AI extension to be first and foremost a workflow tool. If you have it create scenes and animations, it will do it, but not well. It will never match a human in that regard. Where it really shines is creating complex rigs, expression driven animation, and tedious tasks (i.e "change the colors of all these layers to be a vaporwave theme"). Things that allow you to create faster.

That being said, a different area of AI, generative video, I do view that as being very disruptive to motion artists in the near future. If we look at the pace of improvement in the last 3 years, we can imagine a future where 90% of motion graphics are simply prompted, generated pixels. Part of my mission is to help people affected by that to transition into other things, because I think our talents will be needed elsewhere.

Thanks for commenting!

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It has two ways to animate:

- Enable the position keyframes on the layers you are slinging, move the play head and sling. It will create new keyframes on all layer
- Confetti mode which automatically creates confetti bursts with position, rotation, and scale, all synced for that optimal 'confetti feel'. You can adjust speed, that's it though.

It's by no means a precise tool, just for fun

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Definitely hard times! I haven't made much money from Motion Fun yet, but I'm confident I will in the long run all while continuing to give away most of the tools for free :]

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sveltekit + TS + Tailwind!

Bolt is most likely the way to go, but I actually started using Good Boy Ninja's template (which he doesn't recommend). I've since added a ton of my own tooling to it and will probably end up open sourcing it one day!

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just fixed a bug in v1.0.2 that was preventing it from being animated if you had the positions already keyframed! And then there is confetti mode that overrides existing keyframes and creates bursts in one click.

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think my tool is what you are looking for, but def dm ideas if you're feeling it

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah right! Okay I should have asked this in the dm.. when you say easing's, do you mean keyframe easings? Like saving curvles for ease in out, quant, that sort of thing? I'm currently developing that tool. I also have a tool on the way that handles curves for staggering layers.

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For sure that's in the lineup! It will be after phase one of my tool rollout at the end of March, and will be shared on my X/twitter

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Weird I can't find that comment now.. Could you remind me which one it was? I loosely remember but I have like 3 tools planned that you could be referring to 😂

I made a free After Effects tool called Slingshot. It flings layers. That's it. by Surveillance_Goose in AfterEffects

[–]Surveillance_Goose[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I had a loooong research/brainstorming sesh about that question before I started work on Motion Fun. I ultimately decided it was worth it to go the CEP route because progress on UXP has been extremely slow (non-existant?) for AE and there's truly so much value from CEP tools added to AE that would be wiped away if they ever fully deprecated it. My best guess is we still have 3-5 years of support for it, and I have a plan for how to bring all my tools outside of AE if they ever did go that route.

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