Settle
Let it settle. Keep the keyframes.
Make 2D layers fall, bounce and collide in After Effects. Preview the motion, then bake editable Position and Rotation keyframes.
- CEP extension
- After Effects CC 2019 to 2026
- macOS and Windows
- MIT, out since Sep 2026
Pick a feel. Knock it over.
A browser sketch: boxes, gravity and a floor. The plugin runs Matter.js inside After Effects, with eight presets and every value editable.
The same idea, in After Effects.
Six text layers and a floor, set up in the Settle panel, previewed, baked and rendered. The film above is the render. Below, the panel and timeline show how it was made.
Point at a red pin to read the crit
- Bodies
- Six letters, Dynamic · Wood. The floor, Passive
- World
- Gravity 981 px/s² · walls on all four sides · 4 substeps
- Bake
- 180 frames at 30 fps · 2,172 keyframes · one undo group
- Render
- H.264, 1920 × 1080, 6 seconds, motion blur on
Text layers collide as their bounding boxes, so each letter lands like a block. That is the current limit, shown as it is.
Point at a red pin to read the crit
Physics you can still edit afterwards.
Settle takes the middle path. Choose how a layer should behave, pick a feel, preview it, and if it looks right, bake it. What lands in the timeline is standard Position and Rotation keyframes, so the simulation stops being a black box the moment it is done.
Three ways a layer can behave
Dynamic moves and collides under the solver. Passive is a fixed floor, wall or obstacle. Kinematic follows the animation you already made while pushing the Dynamic bodies around it.
Eight presets to start from
Balloon, Rubber, Plastic, Metal, Wood, Ice, Foam and Cardboard. Artist-friendly starting points rather than laboratory measurements, and every value underneath is yours to change.
Preview before you commit
The simulation runs inside the panel. Previewing does not touch After Effects, so you can keep trying until the motion reads right and lose nothing if it does not.
Repeatable, not random
Natural motion adds drift, lift and wobble suited to the preset. The seed is saved per layer, so previewing again or baking the same preview gives the same motion instead of fresh jitter.
It bakes, then it gets out of the way.
A bake writes plain Position and Rotation keys and wraps the whole thing in a single undo group. The Clean tab reduces the keyframe count afterwards and reports the simplification error it measured, so you decide how much smoothing is acceptable rather than trusting a number you cannot see.
- Requirements
- After Effects CC 2019 to 2026, macOS or Windows
- Physics
- Matter.js, bundled offline. No account or network
- Install
- Run the installer, quit After Effects fully, reopen, then Window > Extensions
Good to know.
For now, Settle builds bodies from circles and rotated rectangles taken from visible layer bounds.
Arbitrary mask contours, concave shapes, joints, liquids and soft bodies are not simulated yet.
Only unparented 2D layers are supported; parented layers, 3D layers, cameras and lights are refused with a message rather than handled quietly.
Existing transform expressions and separated Position dimensions block a bake instead of being overwritten.