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After Effects
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Unreal Engine
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ShotLink
Use Unreal Engine inside After Effects as a live render layer in your comp.
NOTE: Windows only. macOS coming soon.
Stay in After Effects. Render in Unreal.
ShotLink is an After Effects plugin. Pick a camera in your running Unreal project and its render appears live in your comp as a layer — no export, no image sequence, no re-import when the scene changes.
Not just a flat frame: beauty, depth, normals and object mattes each arrive as their own layer with real alpha. Click a point in the image and a 3D null lands on that surface, so your AE layers sit inside the shot.
The After Effects timeline drives everything. Animate the AE camera and the Unreal camera follows; pick a Level Sequence and the scene animates with your comp.
Turn on Realtime and Unreal keeps sending frames — change a light, a material or the scene itself, and you see it in the comp as you work.
A walkthrough, one feature at a time
Every control in the effect panel
SourceThe Unreal camera you are rendering
Lists every ShotLink Camera in the running Unreal project. Picking one starts the live link.
Each entry reads as the camera name, then the level, then the project, then the mode Unreal is running in:
ShotLinkCamera – Scene [Examples] [Editor]
These are simply the cameras you created in Unreal. Give them names that say what they're for — EarthOnly, Normal, Depth — and picking the right one takes a glance instead of a guess.
The level tells you which scene the camera lives in, useful when a project has several. The mode is [Editor] most of the time, but [PIE], [Build] and others work just as well.
SequenceThe range Unreal will render
Binds the comp to a Level Sequence: every frame in After Effects requests that same frame from the sequence, and the layer takes the sequence's length. Leave it on None to work with the live level instead.
If you've never used Sequencer: it's Unreal's timeline, and with ShotLink it animates the scene — lights, objects, materials — while the camera stays yours in After Effects until you bake it back for the final render.
Think of the layer as the slot your final frames will drop into. At the end of the job you render the shot at full quality out of Unreal through Movie Render Queue and bring those frames back into this comp — for them to land frame-for-frame, the layer has to mirror the sequence exactly.
That's why it won't let you trim it: shorten it by hand and it snaps back. Need it longer? Lengthen the sequence in Unreal and the layer follows.
Swapping the rendered frames in is a manual step today — automating it is on the roadmap.
Baking a camera requires a sequence to be selected.
Realtime ModeKeep the Unreal view updating continuously
After Effects normally redraws a frame only when something in the comp changes — you move the camera, tweak a parameter, scrub the timeline. With Realtime Mode on, ShotLink keeps refreshing the frame you're parked on, so anything you change in Unreal — a light, a material, an object — appears in your composition without you touching anything in After Effects.
After Effects caches everything, always. In Realtime Mode that's wasted work — it caches frames that Unreal will overwrite a moment later. Turn off Cache Frames When Idle while you work this way; the picture is already live, there's nothing to pre-render.
Memory also fills up fast in this mode — a few After Effects settings keep the machine responsive during long sessions. Recommended settings ↗
OriginWhere Unreal's world zero sits in your comp
The 3D point that After Effects treats as Unreal's origin. Use the picker to set it from the comp, or pull it from the scene with Origin from Unreal.
Unreal scenes often sit thousands of centimetres from world zero. Origin exists so your After Effects camera doesn't have to — put it on the subject you're actually shooting, not on world zero. The AE camera then works in readable numbers, and nulls and 3D text live around the object instead of pointing off a kilometre into the distance.
If the comp already has a 3D track with its own origin, set this to match and the Unreal geometry sits on the plate without hand-fitting.
Reuse a camera move anywhere in the level. The camera animation is relative to the Origin, not to Unreal's world zero — so moving the Origin moves the whole move with it. Animate one fly-through around a building, then set the Origin to another building across the level and the identical move plays out there.
Unit ScalePixels per centimetre
Unreal works in centimetres, After Effects in pixels. This is the conversion used whenever positions travel between them — the camera, created nulls, baked animation.
Leave it at 1 for a straight match between the two worlds: one centimetre in Unreal is one pixel in the comp. Change it only when you want a different scale on purpose. Accepts four decimal places.
Origin from UnrealSet the origin to where the Unreal camera is standing
Asks the connected scene for its current camera position and writes it into Origin. Useful once you've flown to the part of the level you're shooting: hit Get and the comp's zero lands right there, instead of typing coordinates by hand.
Only active while a Source is connected.
Picked PositionWhere on the image you want the null
Click the crosshair next to the parameter, then click the spot in the comp — its position lands here. Unreal works out what's behind that pixel when the null is created.
Null at PositionTurn that point into a 3D null
Creates a null in the comp at the exact spot in the Unreal scene you clicked — depth and surface orientation resolved by the engine, no tracking involved. Parent text, graphics or effects to it and they stay put through any camera move.
The point has to be something solid. ShotLink traces a ray into the scene, so it lands on geometry with collision — click on particles, atmosphere or an object with collision turned off and nothing happens. The ray reaches about 10 km; beyond that it misses.
If the button does nothing, that's a miss, not a bug — pick a spot on actual geometry.
Transfer from UnrealCopy the Unreal camera onto your AE camera
Takes the current state of the ShotLink Camera — position, rotation and lens settings — and applies it to the After Effects camera.
Handy for starting from a framing you already found: fly around the scene in Unreal until the shot looks right, hit Get, and continue animating in After Effects from there.
Only active while a Source is connected.
Bake to SequencerSend the AE camera to Unreal as keyframes
Writes your animated After Effects camera into the selected Level Sequence — position, rotation, sensor size and focus, keyed per frame — so Unreal can render the final on its own through Movie Render Queue.
A new CineCamera is created and bound to the sequence; your ShotLink Camera stays as it is.
Needs a Source and a Sequence selected, and the layer must span the full sequence duration — if something's off, a dialog will tell you why.
What you need
| Host application | Adobe After Effects 2025.2 or newer |
|---|---|
| Unreal Engine | 5.6, 5.7 or 5.8 |
| Operating system | Windows 10 and 11. macOS is not supported yet. |
No Unreal installed? Try it anyway.
A packaged Unreal scene runs live in After Effects without the engine installed — you only need the AE plugin. Load it, scrub the timeline, and judge the workflow on your own machine before you buy.
Image quality
ShotLink delivers the frame exactly as Unreal renders it. Most scenes look right straight away.
Some Unreal settings are built for realtime playback rather than single frames — auto exposure, screen-space reflections, temporal accumulation. If you see flicker or smeared reflections, a few of them need adjusting by hand. It takes minutes, and you do it once per project.
Before you buy
Do I need to know Unreal Engine?
To get going, barely. Open your Unreal project, add a ShotLink camera and drive it from After Effects. Render passes come as ready presets, and you only need to go deeper — into MRQ and console variables — when you want maximum quality.
Do I need Unreal Engine installed?
To work with your own Unreal projects, yes. The included packaged example can run without Unreal Engine installed, so you can try the After Effects side of ShotLink first.
Is this a renderer, or does it use Unreal's?
Unreal's. ShotLink asks Unreal to render a frame and passes the result to After Effects. Your existing scene, lighting and materials stay in Unreal — ShotLink brings the rendered result into your comp.
How do I render the final shot?
You can render straight from After Effects with Unreal supplying each frame. If you prefer to finish in Unreal, Bake sends the AE camera animation back as a CineCameraActor, ready for Movie Render Queue.
Will it work on my Mac?
Not yet. ShotLink is Windows-only today; macOS support is on the roadmap.
Was ShotLink written with AI?
No. The code is written by hand. ShotLink sits between two render pipelines and exchanges data with both on every frame. For this kind of low-level integration, predictable behaviour matters, and we want to understand every line of code we ship.
What should we build next?
ShotLink is actively developed. Pick the one you'd use first — it helps us decide what comes next.
Two people behind ShotLink
ShotLink is built by a two-person team with backgrounds in game development, VFX and motion design. Questions, bug reports and feature requests go directly to us.
Developer. Spent a decade at Crytek working on CRYENGINE, followed by technical director roles at Wargaming and other studios.
VFX & design. Senior VFX artist at Crytek and GSC Game World, and a VideoHive Elite Author.
Discussions
Want to talk about it?
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
2026.9.2 -
Oct 6, 2026
Compatibility
After Effects
2026, 2025
Unreal Engine
5.8, 5.7, 5.6
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