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After Effects
- New
XDoG Studio
XDoG Studio is a GPU-accelerated graphic stylization effect for After Effects, built to transform footage into bold toon, ink, sketch, and edge-driven looks.
Windows-compatible only.
Built around Extended Difference of Gaussians processing, XDoG Studio gives motion designers and visual artists direct control over line detail, edge width, threshold response, posterization, flow-guided smoothing, colour treatment, blending, all inside After Effects. Windows-compatible only.
Key Features
- GPU-accelerated stylisation for Adobe After Effects
- XDoG and DoG-based line art rendering
- Comic ink, toon, sketch, manga, and edge-driven looks
- CUDA and OpenCL support on Windows
- CPU fallback rendering
- Flow-guided smoothing for cleaner directional linework
- Posterise controls for graphic colour and tonal reduction
- Blend, colour, saturation, brightness, and threshold controls
- Designed for footage, stills, precomps, motion design, and experimental visual treatments
Turn Footage into Graphic Illustration
XDoG Studio uses edge-aware image processing to extract and stylize detail from your footage. Instead of relying on simple outlines or one-click posterization, XDoG Studio gives you a flexible toolkit for shaping the final look.
Core Controls
Dial in the Look
XDoG Studio’s core controls let you shape the character of the effect before moving into colour and advanced styling.
Detail Scale
Controls the scale of detail used to generate the XDoG result. Lower values reveal finer detail, while higher values create broader, cleaner graphic shapes.
Edge Width
Controls the apparent weight of the linework. Use lower values for fine ink detail or higher values for heavier comic-style outlines.
Sharpness
Adjusts the strength and definition of the edge response. Increase Sharpness for stronger, crisper linework.
White Point
Controls where the image transitions toward white, helping determine how much detail remains visible in the final look.
Transition Hardness
Controls whether tonal transitions feel soft and sketch-like or hard and posterized.
Posterize
Simplify Colour and Tone
The Posterize controls reduce tonal and colour detail to create cleaner, more graphic images. This is useful for toon, comic, manga, poster, and print-inspired looks.
Use Posterise to:
• Reduce footage into bold tonal steps
• Create cleaner graphic colour shapes
• Push the image toward cel-shaded treatments
• Balance detail against readability
• Combine stylised edges with simplified colour
Posterize can be used subtly to clean up footage or pushed harder for bold graphic abstraction.
Flow-Guided Linework
Smoother, More Directed Edges
Enable Use Flow to guide the linework along the natural structure of the image. This helps strokes feel more coherent and less noisy, especially on subjects with strong forms and directional detail.
Use Flow for:
• Faces
• Clothing
• Vehicles
• Architecture
• Landscapes
• Organic shapes
• High-detail footage that needs cleaner line direction
Flow-guided processing can help create smoother, more illustrative results while keeping the edge-driven character of XDoG Studio.
Advanced Stylization Controls
Fine-tune your look with controls for line detail, threshold response, flow smoothing, quantization, colour blending, and stylized RGB processing. XDoG Studio is designed to move quickly from bold one-click results into deeper artistic control when you want to refine the image.
Stylised Colour with DoG RGB
XDoG Studio includes a dedicated DoG RGB mode for creating colourful graphic treatments from your footage. By applying Difference of Gaussians processing across colour channels, DoG RGB can produce bold posterized looks, stylized colour edges, toon-like treatments, and experimental image-processing styles that go beyond traditional black-and-white edge detection.
It is ideal when you want the image to feel illustrated, but still retain the colour, tone, and atmosphere of the original shot.
• Turn footage into graphic colour treatments
• Preserve colour while simplifying detail
• Create toon, comic, posterised, and illustrated looks
• Use flow-guided smoothing to shape colour detail
• Blend the result back over the original image
GPU Acceleration
Built for Fast Stylization
XDoG Studio includes GPU acceleration to help make complex stylization more practical inside After Effects.
Supported render paths
- CUDA
- OpenCL
- CPU fallback
GPU rendering is recommended for the best performance, especially with high-resolution footage, flow-guided processing, and complex stylized looks.
For heavier 4K projects, previewing at Half or Quarter resolution can help while adjusting settings.
Compatibility
- Windows x64
- After Effects 2022 or later
- CUDA-compatible GPUs
- OpenCL-compatible GPUs
- CPU fallback rendering
For best results, use an up-to-date GPU driver and a supported version of Adobe After Effects.
Performance Note
XDoG Studio is GPU accelerated and is recommended for systems with a compatible NVIDIA CUDA or OpenCL-capable GPU.
A CPU render path is included for compatibility and fallback use, but XDoG Studio is not recommended for CPU-only systems due to significantly slower performance.
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
1.0.0 -
Jul 27, 2026
Compatibility
After Effects
2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022
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