Built by someone who got tired of two bad options

Hi, I'm Sander. I make motion graphics at Able & Baker, and like most people in mograph I kept hitting the same wall: when something needed to feel physical, I had two options. Hand-animate every bounce and tumble, which eats a morning. Or buy a rocket-grade physics plugin for rocket-grade money to do a job that was, honestly, pretty small.

So I built the in-between. MatterAE started as a tool for me: a real-time physics panel that lives inside After Effects, lets me tweak gravity and bounce and weight while it runs, and bakes the result to plain keyframes I can edit by hand. No round trips, no separate app, no locked-in dependency. Just drop, watch, bake, move on.

The bicycle, not the rocket

I want to be clear about scope, because it is the whole philosophy. The big physics plugins are genuinely brilliant. They are rockets, built by people who clearly love this stuff, and they do things MatterAE will never do. If you need deep rigging, buoyancy and complex joint systems, go buy one, they are worth every cent.

But most days you do not need a rocket to cross town. You need a bicycle that is already at your door. MatterAE is the bicycle. It covers the 90% of everyday mograph physics that just needs to feel right, fast, and the price is set to match that scope.

About that rejection

I submitted MatterAE to the dominant AE plugin marketplace. It got turned away for "duplicate functionality" because a physics plugin already existed there. I sat with that for a day, felt a bit sorry for myself, and then realised it was the best framing the project could have asked for.

A market with several physics tools in it is not a market with too many. It is a market with demand. So instead of fighting that, MatterAE leans into it: launching independently on Gumroad, priced like the practical tool it is, free to try, and cheerfully owning the "duplicate" label right there in the headline.

Where it is now

MatterAE is in active beta, growing fast, with a real changelog behind it. It is shaped heavily by the people testing it and posting feedback. If you have an idea or you hit a bug, that genuinely changes what gets built next.