The Environment for After Effects Plugin Development

GOAL

To set up the environment for After Effects plugin. To build sample plug-in and execute it.

Environment

Adobe CC2019 v16.0.0
Windows10 with environment for C++ compile
Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 ver15.8.4

Method

1 Download The After Effects SDKs

Access Adobe Web site and click “Get the SDKs” button to get After Effects SDKs. Select “After Effects Plug-in SDK” for your AE version.

2 Set build path as environment variable

Add environment variable “AE_PLUGIN_BUILD_DIR” and set output directory. If it doesn’t exist, the error “fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file ‘***.aex” will occur.

3 Build sample plug-in

Unzip “After+Effects+CC+16.0+Win+SDK.zip” and put the unzipped directory “AfterEffectsSDK” into appropriate location.

Open AfterEffectsSDK\Examples\BuildAll.sln then Visual studio will start.

Right Click on “SDK Noise” and Build it.

If the error “C2220: warning treated as error – no ‘object’ file generated” occurred, fix the project configuration not to treat warning as error.

4 Put the plugin into AE Directory

Put the “SDK_Noise.aex” file into “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Support Files” Directory.

5 Add plug-in Effect

Open AE project and click Effect>Sample Plug-ins>SDK_Noise

A noise effect is added to the video.