Real skies, from first light to blue hour.
The whole sky in one effect: an atmosphere that shifts color with the time of day, a sun placed by date and location, eight cloud genera across up to eight layers, and photographic lens glare. Animate everything, from the time of day and wind to each cloud’s lifecycle.
60–90 s, 1920×1080. Follow one full day in timelapse (morning, golden hour, sunset, blue hour) under the same sky, then switch cloud genera and bring the sun into frame with glare.
Cloud generators already exist, but what about the rest? A sky that changes color with the sun’s elevation, a sun placed by date and location, clouds that follow their weather type, and a lens that photographs the whole thing—all in one effect instead of a stack of them.
A simplified browser preview with a single cloud layer; the plugin includes the full atmosphere, up to eight layers, and lens glare.
A background sky for a city, landscape, or 3D scene, with the comp camera driving the view.
Sunset, blue hour, and afterglow when the script calls for them, not when the shoot schedule allows.
Animate clouds forming, growing, and dissolving with Coverage, Timelapse, and cloud lifecycles.
A clean, controlled sky behind a car, package, or architecture, in 32 bpc for grading.
Equirectangular output with no lens effects, ready for an environment map or projection.
Light tints, halftones, and shadows for graphic skies that still feel physical.
Transmittance and multiple-scattering LUTs, a per-frame sky-view LUT, auto exposure, and full-resolution compositing. Ozone, a curved planet, ground albedo, and observer altitude up to 80 km. Set the sun by azimuth and elevation or by date and location.
Each layer has one genus, with altitude and thickness tuned to its typical range. Procedural cells in world space give every cloud its own size, height, and presence, grouped by a weather field: nothing repeats or lines up on a grid.
Beer–Lambert light marching toward the sun, multiple-scattering octaves, a two-lobe phase function, powder, shadows from upper layers, cloud-to-cloud bounce, and per-layer aerial perspective. A fractal domain warp frays the edges into vapor.
Coverage takes a cloud smoothly from nothing to full and back, while Timelapse, Cloud Lifecycle, and Auto Evolution give each cloud a beginning, growth, maturity, and an end. Morph To blends two genera over time; organic wind and camera parallax finish the motion.
The light details near the horizon that make a sunset feel photographed.
Distortion and chromatic aberration act on the rays themselves, so their results stay precise. Glare uses real lens kernels, the starburst follows the aperture blades, ghosts take the kernel’s shape, and lens dirt lights up only where strong light crosses the lens.
Screen-space god rays follow sky visibility, while volumetric light marches through haze, with cloud and planetary shadows.
With Use AE Camera, the comp camera’s orientation and zoom drive the view. Output can be perspective or 360 equirectangular, ready for an environment map.
These are the parameter groups as they appear in After Effects. Every control is animatable.
Confirm whether sky presets will ship (the plugin includes reference scenes like golden hour, sunset, and layered sky). For the page: count and 8–12 16:9 thumbnails.
3–6 artist shots with before-and-after skies, each with a name, link, and testimonial.
A short artist quote, name, role, and studio, with a photo or avatar.
A second testimonial, ideally from a production company (the brand’s other audience).
5–8 min: apply it to a Solid, set the sun by date and location, and add the first cloud layer.
6 min: stack cumulus, altocumulus, and cirrus, then add wind and evolution.
5 min: Use AE Camera, parallax, and compositing with 3D elements.
PDF or documentation page covering every Effect Controls group.
Discord or forum link.
Support email or help desk, with response time.
Decide on the fields below. On the finished page, this becomes a purchase card with buttons to buy and download the trial.
No. With Mercury GPU set to DirectX, rendering goes straight through AE’s GPU pipeline. In CUDA, Metal, or software projects, the plugin renders on its own D3D12 device and returns 8, 16, or 32 bpc.
On our development GPU at 1080p, Preview takes about 70 ms. Final takes about 250 ms with cumulus and 550 ms with stratocumulus.
No. The renderer uses DirectX 12, which is only available on Windows.
Not yet.