After Effects templates are built for speeding up motion design workflows. Whether you make After Effects templates for your own use, your team, or to sell to the masses, there are tools to improve your workflow and make your templates even better.
Here are my top 5 favorite tools to use for making After Effects templates.
Parental Controls is a free After Effects script that lets you attach layers to the actual path, shape, or text of a parent layer.
Attaching objects to the actual text is particularly useful for After Effects templates. Adding parental controls allows end users to change the text within text layers and have child layers update accordingly.
Best of all, end users won’t need the script on their end – in fact they won’t even know you used it. Parental Controls will add an expression to the position of the layer you want to attach without impacting the overall layout or design. Once applied, the child will be parented to the actual text of the text layer.
If your templates use more than one expression control, Pseudo Effect Maker 3 is a must have.
This After Effects scripts allows you consolidate all your expression controls into a single effect. This helps to clean up your project and make using the template way easier for end users.
Again, if your templates use more than one expression, ExpressionUniversalizer 4 is another must have.
This After Effects script converts all your expressions to universalized expressions – meaning they (and your template) will work in any language version of After Effects.
With a single click, ExpressionUniversalizer does all the work for you and makes your project compatible in any language.
With a name like Templater, of course it’s going to be helpful in making templates.
This script from Dataclay allows you to connect your After Effects project to Google Sheets. You can automatically swap out text, images, and other assets.
If you need render 10, 100, or 1,000 different iterations of the same After Effects template, Templater is worth checking out. With the click of a button you can have your entire project automatically cycle through rows & rows of spreadsheet data to update and render videos at scale.
If your After Effects template uses numbers, then you should use Num. Num is a free preset that allows you to quickly format and animate numbers in After Effects.
Even if you’re comfortable with writing numerical expressions in After Effects, Num can save you time. And you can even edit the expression yourself to connect it to other controls within your After Effects project.
