Figma designs inside After Effects

A design does not have to be flattened to a PNG to reach After Effects. This page shows what each part of a Figma file becomes once it lands, one property at a time, using the real output of a transfer rather than an illustration of one.

Every image below is the result exactly as it landed in After Effects, transferred with Prism from the Figma file shown further down. Several of them put the two side by side so you can check the claim rather than take it. The section on what does not transfer is on this page for the same reason.

A design moving from Figma into After Effects

The source design

One Figma frame carrying every case at once: rounded shapes, a polygon, linear gradients, strokes, headline and body text, semi-transparent fills, a blur, a drop shadow and placed artwork.

It was sent to After Effects in a single transfer, and everything shown on this page came out of that one send.

What arrives is a layer stack

This is the composition immediately after the transfer, untouched. Every element of the design is its own layer, under its own name, in the order it had, with the frames and groups around it rebuilt as nested compositions and the parenting links already wired. Nothing here was placed by hand, and nothing is a flattened picture. That is the difference between receiving a design and receiving a screenshot of one.

Rectangles, ellipses, polygons Native shape layers

Rectangles, ellipses, polygons

The frames, cards, buttons and dividers a layout is built from, with their sizes, corner radii and polygon side counts.

Each one becomes a real After Effects shape layer, not a picture of one. In the screenshot the polygon arrived as a Polystar Path with its point count and radius as live numbers, and its corner radius as a Round Corners modifier sitting above the fill. Widen the card, give the polygon two more sides, render at any resolution: it stays vector, and nothing goes back to Figma.

Text layers Text you can still retype

Text layers

Headlines, labels and paragraphs, with their font, weight, size, letter spacing, line height and alignment.

Text arrives as a live After Effects text layer. The Character panel in the screenshot is reading the real font and the real size off the transferred layer, not a screenshot of Figma: the family and weight are matched against the fonts installed on your machine. Multi-line and mixed-style text come across, and the anchor point is centred on each text layer, which is the small detail that makes scaling and rotating a caption behave the way you expect.

Linear and radial gradients Live gradient fills

Linear and radial gradients

A fill built from colour stops rather than one flat colour, at whatever angle the design puts it.

The gradient arrives as a real gradient fill inside the shape layer, with its start and end points, its type and its colour stops. The screenshot has the gradient editor open on a transferred layer: every stop is still there, still draggable, still recolourable. This is the part most often flattened into a bitmap on the way over, and it is exactly the part that makes a design look designed.

Strokes and outlines Its own stroke, over the fill

Strokes and outlines

The border around a shape: its thickness, its colour, its dash pattern and the shape of its ends.

The stroke is built as its own entry stacked over the fill, the way Figma composes it, instead of being painted into the same pixels. In the screenshot Stroke 1 and Fill 1 are two separate rows under the same shape, each with its own colour and opacity. That keeps them independent: recolour the border without touching what it surrounds, or animate its thickness on its own. Dash patterns and line caps come across with it.

Layer blur and drop shadow Real effects, with the design's numbers

Layer blur and drop shadow

The two effects that carry most of the depth in a modern layout: a softened layer, and a shadow offset behind an element.

Each becomes a genuine effect on the layer rather than something baked into it. The screenshot shows both on one transferred shape: a drop shadow carrying its colour, its opacity, its direction, its distance and its softness, and a gaussian blur carrying its radius. Because they are real effects you can keyframe them, switch one off to compare, or drop something else in between. Inner shadow and glow transfer too.

Opacity, per fill and per layer Kept as two separate controls

Opacity, per fill and per layer

Figma has two different transparencies and designers use both: the opacity of a single fill or stroke, and the opacity of the whole layer.

They stay separate on the way over. In the screenshot the fill is at 30 percent inside the shape while the layer transform is still at 100, exactly as the design had it, so lowering one does not silently change the other. Collapsing the two into a single number is the usual shortcut, and it is what makes a transferred design look almost right and impossible to correct.

Images and complex vectors Footage layers, placed and scaled

Images and complex vectors

Photos, image fills, icons, logos and any path too intricate to rebuild as a shape layer.

These are exported from Figma at full resolution and come in as footage layers pointing at real files, placed and scaled where they belong. The shaded prism in the screenshot is one of them: a piece of art no shape layer would reproduce faithfully, arriving sharp and in position instead of approximated. Swapping it later is a matter of replacing the file.

Frames, groups and nesting The same tree, as nested compositions

Frames, groups and nesting

The structure of the file: what sits inside what, in which order, and what is parented to what.

Put the two layer lists next to each other and they are the same list. Every frame and group in the design came across as its own composition, keeping its name, its place in the order and its nesting, with parenting links wired between the layers that had them. This is the difference between receiving a design and receiving a picture of one: you can open any part of it on its own and animate it without disturbing the rest.