Free tools

More than plugins.

Some of the things an animator needs are not effects. These are standalone apps I built for my own pipeline and gave away: free, open source, no license, no account.

Free MIT licensed Windows Open source

AE Skinner

Change the After Effects splash screen, About window, interface colors and render sounds on any version you have installed: no hunting for the right DLL, no hand-editing theme XML. Drop in an image, pick colors, hit Apply.

  • Nothing is hardcoded: it reads the artwork sizes, resource languages and color-ramp lengths out of your own binaries, so one build covers AE 2020 through the 2026 betas
  • Everything it touches is backed up first, outside the Adobe folder so a Creative Cloud update can't wipe the backup, and restored with one click
  • It refuses to patch any binary that does not identify itself as Adobe's, and re-skins an already-skinned install as happily as a stock one
  • Live splash preview while you type the caption, plus a dry run that reports every change before a byte is written
Download for Windows Source on GitHub

v1.1.0 · 37 MB · Windows 10 / 11 · needs administrator rights, because After Effects lives under Program Files

AE Skinner's Artwork page: an After Effects install picker, a dropped splash image, fitting options, and a live preview of the resulting splash screen.
Drop an image in, and it is fitted to every splash slot the install actually has, at that slot's exact pixel size.

What AE Skinner can change

Adobe removed native interface theme coloring in the After Effects 2025 line. Everything else works on every version.

WhatWhere it shows upWorks on
SplashThe startup screen, every resolution variant the install ships✓ Every version
AboutThe About window card✓ Every version
CaptionTitle, subtitle and footer drawn over your own artwork✓ Every version
InterfacePanels, tabs, fields, accents and guidesAE 2024 and older
SoundsThe render-finished and render-failed chimes✓ Every version

Changed the interface color and nothing happened?

You are almost certainly on After Effects 2025 or newer, where Adobe removed UI theme coloring entirely. It is not a setting you missed. AE Skinner still patches and verifies those resources, so it labels those installs “no theme” in the picker and warns before applying. Splash, About and sounds still work there, 2026 included.

The evidence, tested across six versions

One accent color, the whole program

Pick an accent and AE Skinner recolors the chrome greys toward it across every AE theme you list. Label colors, warnings and cache bars are excluded by name, so the parts of the interface that mean something keep meaning it.

  • Editable chrome ramp: click any stop to set it by hand
  • Hue strength slider, from neutral greys to fully tinted
  • Presets, plus a command line for scripted installs
AE Skinner's Interface page: accent color picker, hue strength slider, an editable chrome ramp of ten grey-to-accent stops, and the list of After Effects themes to recolor.
The chrome ramp AE Skinner writes back into AfterFXLib.dll and dvaui.dll, stop by stop.

More tools are on the way.

Panels, converters and utilities come out of the same pipeline as the plugins. When one is ready for other people to use, it lands here.

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