How Prism moves your design into After Effects

Overview

Prism is a bridge between design tools and After Effects. Instead of exporting a flattened PNG and re-drawing every shape by hand, you select something in Figma or Illustrator, push it, and it lands in your AE composition as real, keyframeable layers: shape layers stay shapes, text stays live text, gradients are rebuilt as actual AE fills, and groups keep their original nesting.

• Two design sources, one AE builder. The Figma plugin and the Illustrator panel both send the same layer data to the same After Effects engine, so the result is consistent no matter where the design comes from.
• Editable, not flattened. Shapes, text and fills stay native AE objects you can restyle and animate immediately.
• Layer structure preserved. Frames, groups and component nesting come across as the same hierarchy in AE.

Install

Prism has two pieces: a design-side plugin (Figma and/or Illustrator) and one After Effects panel that both plugins talk to.

FIGMA

Figma workflow

From inside Figma, select a frame or a set of layers and run Prism. The plugin reads the selection exactly as Figma renders it and sends it to After Effects.

• Shapes and vectors arrive as individual AE shape layers, not one merged image.
• Text stays live and editable, font, size and copy can be changed straight in After Effects.
• Solid colors and gradients are rebuilt as real AE fills, not baked into a bitmap.
• Image fills and exported bitmaps are placed at full resolution, correctly scaled and positioned.
• Effects like blur and shadow carry over as keyframeable AE effects.
• Components and instances are recognized and kept as their own organized layers.

ILLUSTRATOR

Illustrator workflow

A Prism Illustrator license unlocks an Illustrator panel that feeds the same After Effects builder used by the Figma plugin. Select artwork on the canvas and push it across.

• Paths, text and groups are extracted and rebuilt as native AE layers.
• Rectangles, ellipses, stars and polygons drawn with Illustrator's own shape tools are detected and rebuilt as parametric AE shapes, not baked outlines, so their roundness, radius and points stay adjustable.
• Gradients (solid, linear and radial) are rebuilt with the correct angle and position.
• Clipping masks come across as a proper AE alpha track matte.
• Blend modes and stroke caps/joins are carried over.
• Rotated and multi-line text, including right-to-left scripts, is read directly from Illustrator's text engine.

Push

Push is the core action in both Figma and Illustrator: select something, click send, and the layers appear in your active After Effects composition.

• Grouped elements are pushed as a single nested layer structure, matching how they were grouped in the design tool.
• Loose shapes on the canvas arrive as individual layers.
• The panel in After Effects shows a live connection status, so you always know whether a push landed.

Re-send / Live Sync

Editing a design after the first push is the normal case, and Prism is built around it. Every layer Prism creates carries an internal tag back to the exact element it came from.

• Re-sending an edited frame updates the matching layers in place instead of creating duplicates.
• New elements added since the last send are added, never mistaken for a replacement.
• The layer's position in the AE stack is preserved across updates, so re-ordering work you already did in AE is not lost.

Groups & layer structure

How you group elements in the design tool decides how they arrive in After Effects.

• Grouped elements become a single nested layer structure in AE, keeping the same parent/child relationship.
• Ungrouped elements arrive as individual, independent layers.
• Frames, groups and component nesting are rebuilt at every depth, not just the top level.

Unsupported elements

Not everything a design app can render is exposed through its scripting API. Where that is the wall, Prism is upfront about it rather than silently producing a broken layer.

• Illustrator Appearance-panel effects (live drop shadow, blur, glow applied via Effect > Stylize) are not readable through Illustrator's scripting interface, so they are not carried over as editable AE effects.
• Stacked fills/strokes on a single Illustrator object (multiple fills via the Appearance panel) are not exposed by the scripting API either; only the top fill and stroke transfer.
• Illustrator stroke alignment (inside/outside) is not exposed by the API and defaults to center, matching Illustrator's own default.

License activation

Prism is purchased once, no subscription. The Figma plugin is free to install; sending designs into After Effects requires an activated license.

• Activation is tied to your Prism account and checked by the After Effects panel on start.
• The panel's status indicator shows whether the bridge is running and whether the license is active, so a licensing issue is visible before you try to push.