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After Effects
MB Liquid Glass
GPU accelerated, Liquid Glass like effect for After Effects, with fully adjustable glass refraction, magnification, blur, highlight and shadow, multiple ways to use.
Native liquid-glass refraction plugin for After Effects
MB Liquid Glass is a native Adobe After Effects effect plug-in for creating editable glass-style refraction directly inside your composition.
Use it to add soft lens distortion, background blur, spectral color separation, highlights, tint, and shadow to shape layers, matte sources, or built-in rounded rectangles in After Effects.
4 types of glass silhouettes
Visual Effects
Discussions
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Head over to r/aescripts to chat with fellow users about this product.
Need Support?
Please open a support ticket to be connected directly with the author of this product
Version History
1.5.1 -
Sep 7, 2026
- Shape List now supports multiple rectangles within each bound Shape Layer, with up to 256 active rectangles per effect.
- Fixed corner roundness not following Shape Layer scaling, including different X and Y scale values.
- Improved shape alignment through nested Shape Group transforms and parent-layer chains, including rotation, skew, and mirrored scales.
1.5.0b -
Aug 31, 2026
- Due to limitations in the After Effects SDK, MB Liquid Glass refraction may not behave as expected with some 3D layers or nested layers (precompositions / collapse transformations), especially when Collapse Transformations is enabled or the same 3D precomposition is reused. If you encounter a related issue, feel free to contact the author at [email protected].
## New: Magnification
- Added a `Magnification` control under `Glass Optics > Advanced`, with a scale range from `-4` to `4`. `1` preserves the original scale, `2` produces a `200%` magnified view, and negative values mirror the sampled backdrop around the glass center.
- Magnification affects only the backdrop seen through the glass; the glass outline, Shadow, Fresnel, Highlight, and surrounding composition remain in place.
## Shape List and Render Path
- The Shape List now grows with its contents, allowing all 32 supported rows to be reached through normal Effect Controls panel scrolling. Selecting a row also no longer triggers a rerender of the current frame.
- Render Path options are now `Auto (GPU First)`, `CPU Only`, and `GPU First`. Auto and GPU First both prefer GPU acceleration and safely fall back to CPU when needed; CPU Only disables GPU rendering completely.
- Projects saved with the former `GPU Only` value remain compatible and will display `GPU First` in this version.
## Performance and Rendering Stability
- Improved concurrent rendering and long-export stability under Multi-Frame Rendering, reducing cross-frame state reuse and unnecessary CPU contention.
- Improved consistency between CPU and GPU rendering across preview resolutions, tiled renders, and automatic fallback.
## Fixes: Nested Compositions and Layer Stacking
- Improved Self Layer resolution through deeply nested compositions and Collapse Transformations, fixing duplicated or time-shifted instances that could disappear.
- Fixed stacked Adjustment Layer effects so an upper effect preserves glass that has already been rendered below it.
## Fixes: Matte Layer and SmartFX
- Improved External Matte mapping in transformed, cropped, tiled, and non-square preview renders, preventing small mattes from being treated as if they covered the full composition.
- Fixed valid empty or non-intersecting regions that could produce black tiles or After Effects render errors, and improved the alignment of Matte Layer, Self Layer, Shape List, Shadow, and Aqua in partial renders.
## Fixes: Magnification and Windows GPU
- Fixed transparent cross artifacts and seams that could appear near layer boundaries when using Magnification.
- Fixed a Windows OpenCL export failure that could stop rendering with Error 516 when After Effects could not provide a usable GPU render route, and improved Windows CUDA / OpenCL compatibility.
1.4.0 -
Jul 19, 2026
## “Aqua 27” (beta)
- Added the “Aqua 27” material section, using multiple layers of inner and drop shadows to create an updated Liquid Glass look closer to Apple’s 2026 redesign.
- All included visual effects can be toggled independently.
## 3D Layers / Collapse Transformations
- Reworked Self Layer projection for 3D Shape and Text layers, improving refraction, Fresnel, and Highlight rendering.
- Fixed compatibility between glass inside precompositions and Collapse Transformations; glass inside a precomposition now correctly follows the parent composition’s camera and the layer’s transforms.
- Improved Matte Layer and Shape List alignment in transformed and non-square-pixel compositions, and removed the matrix-decomposition warning previously triggered by projective Shape List transforms.
## Refraction / Self Layer Stability
- Added a Refraction Model control for adjusting between the legacy v1.0.3 refraction model and the newer v1.2.0 model, with additional range for strengthening classic refraction or softening modern refraction.
- Self Layer improvements: Improved distance fields for straight edges, complex text, overlapping paths, and shapes touching layer boundaries, reducing missing highlights and broken refraction bands.
- Fixed out-of-bounds refraction sampling by extending the nearest edge pixel, reducing transparent or pure-black gaps along strongly refracted glass edges.
## Transparent Backgrounds / Alpha Channel
- Fixed an issue that incorrectly made Self Layer on 3D Shape and Text layers opaque; Refraction, Tint, Fresnel, Highlight, and Post Blur now preserve transparent and semi-transparent backdrop information more consistently across CPU and GPU paths.
- Expanded SmartFX output coverage, reducing clipping of transparent regions revealed or created by the glass during tiled, partial-frame, or collapsed-composition renders.
## Blur / Performance
- Replaced the sparse emergency blur fallback with a deterministic separable Gaussian blur, fixing cases where high-contrast backgrounds appeared as several offset sharp copies instead of a continuous blur.
- Restored native Frost blur on Metal, CUDA, and OpenCL in Auto mode while retaining a safe CPU fallback, and improved Post Blur consistency between CPU and GPU rendering.
- Added a shared CPU worker budget for Multi-Frame Rendering, reducing thread oversubscription when After Effects renders several frames simultaneously.
## Rendering / Compatibility
- Added native CUDA architecture support for NVIDIA RTX 50-series / Blackwell GPUs.
- Improved Auto mode recovery when a native GPU resource is unavailable, reducing rendering failures caused by specific backends while preserving acceleration whenever possible.
1.2.0 -
Jun 18, 2026
## Refraction / SDF Stability
- Fixed long glass shapes being limited too early by their short edge, so search bars, pill buttons, and wide rounded rectangles can use a larger optical travel range.
- Improved Self Layer SDF continuity for circles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, and custom paths, reducing broken refraction and highlight gaps.
- Simple vector silhouettes now use polygon-exact SDF across the full refraction band, keeping the interior glass body closer to the final outline.
- Custom Bezier paths now use adaptive flattening based on curve length, reducing faceted or broken edges.
## Transparent Backgrounds / Alpha Channel
- The alpha channel now participates in refraction and dispersion sampling, so transparent and semi-transparent footage is refracted with the glass.
- Blur, Frost, and Post Blur now process RGBA together, reducing cases where transparent backgrounds were incorrectly flattened.
- Highlight, Fresnel, and Tint paths now update alpha as well, making glass more consistent in transparent compositions.
## Self Layer / Silhouette Sources
- Removed the user-facing beta label from the Self Layer option.
- Restored silhouette support for PNG, PSD, and other raster-alpha footage used as a Self Layer.
- Shape, text, and mask geometry remains the first-choice silhouette source; raster alpha is used only when no usable geometry is available.
- Complex text, overlapping paths, and inverted masks are normalized into a final boolean silhouette before glass/SDF generation, reducing internal construction-line artifacts.
## 3D / Camera Projection
- Built-in Rounded Rect, Matte Layer, Shape List, and Self Layer silhouettes now participate in camera-aware projection.
- Improved matte sampling, backdrop alignment, and normal projection for 3D layers to reduce mismatch between the glass body and the background.
## Spectral Split / Blur
- Expanded the Spectral Split slider range from 0-50 to 0-100 for stronger prism and color-fringe looks; existing projects within the old range keep the same behavior.
- Continuous wavelength dispersion and spectral blur are more stable on transparent footage.
- Post Blur now carries alpha consistently when softening the final glass composite.
## Compatibility
- Supports CJK language AE environments.
1.0.3 -
Jun 1, 2026
Highlights
- First public launch package for aescripts.
- Includes macOS and Windows builds.
- macOS build is a Universal Binary for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
- Windows build is provided as a 64-bit After Effects .aex plug-in.
- Multiple glass source modes:
- Built-in Rounded Rectangle for quick glass shapes.
- Matte Layer for using another layer or pre-comp as the glass silhouette.
- Self Layer (beta) for using the current layer as the glass source.
- Shape List for binding editable shape layers as glass silhouettes.
- Includes editable controls for refraction thickness, index of refraction, spectral split, blur, fresnel highlights, glare, tint, and shadow.
- Includes an quick start guide with aescripts + aeplugins manager instructions.
Notes
- Self Layer is marked beta and may not be stable in every composition setup.
- For Shape List mode, the bound shape layer must remain visible in the comp so the plug-in can read the guide shape.
- For best Matte Layer results, use a matte source composition with the same size as the main composition.
Compatibility
After Effects
2026, 2025, 2024
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