How to bring Figma’s Liquid Glass into After Effects

Figma’s Glass effect gives a frame the look of Apple’s Liquid Glass. It blurs and bends whatever sits behind it and adds a bright rim and a soft sheen. On a static frame it looks great. The trouble starts when the frame should move.

Export the frame as a PNG and the refraction is baked into the picture. Move the background in After Effects and the glass keeps showing the old one. This guide shows how to bring the glass over as live layers instead, and how we animated the weather card in the video below.

What you need

• Figma desktop with a frame that uses the Glass effect.

• After Effects with the MotionUI panel and the MotionUI app 2.0.3 or newer.

• MotionUI Pro for the Figma import.

• Optional: Claude Code, Codex or the Claude desktop app, if Claude should build the animation for you.

1. Design the glass in Figma

Add the Glass effect to the frame that should become the pane, for example a card. Put something with detail behind it: a photo, a gradient or large type. Glass over a flat color has nothing to bend, so the effect is hard to see.

Settings we start from in our own designs: refraction 0.8, depth around 20 and frost between 4 and 12. Dispersion does not come across to After Effects, so do not rely on its color fringes.

2. Write the animation as notes

This step is optional and only matters if Claude should animate the scene. Add a text layer named Notes directly below the frame, one line per beat, with the time, what happens and the easing. These are the first lines of our weather card:

• 0.30-0.62 | Glass dot grows at the card center | expo

• 0.62-0.98 | Dot stretches into a vertical capsule, card height | expo

• 1.04-1.52 | Capsule opens sideways into the card, Liquid Glass fades in 1.04-1.40 | expo

• 1.6-2.25 | 28° blur reveal, date 1.62, feels like 1.74, °C 1.78

3. Send the frame to After Effects

1. In After Effects, open the composition the card should land in. Without an open composition, MotionUI creates one in the size of the frame.

2. In Figma, run the MotionUI plugin and select the frame.

3. Choose how the layers arrive. We used Groups, so each group becomes a precomp, and Editable, so text stays text.

4. Click Send selection.

5. Keep Figma in the foreground until the import is done. Figma slows plugins down in background tabs, and computing the glass takes a moment.

4. Check what arrived

The glass comes over as a small rig named after the Figma layer. Our pane was called Widget, so the comp contains:

• Widget glass: an adjustment layer with Gaussian Blur and Displacement Map. It bends every layer below it, video included.

• Widget glass rim, Widget glass sheen and Widget glass shade: vector layers for the light, parented to Widget glass.

• Widget bg: the tint of the pane, also parented to Widget glass.

• Widget glass map: a hidden precomp that holds the shape of the pane for the displacement. It follows the glass by expression.

Text, icons and pills arrive as editable layers on top. The photo behind the card stays a normal image layer, so you can move or scale it and watch the glass react.

To test it, move the background a little and scrub the timeline. If the grass bends at the edge of the card, the glass is live. In our scene the background drifts up 34 px over six seconds, and the glass bends it the whole time.

5. Animate the glass

Treat Widget glass as the handle of the card. Animate its position, scale, rotation and opacity, and the rim, sheen, tint and content follow. Only layers below the glass in the layer stack get refracted, so keep the background there.

One thing does not work: animating the width or height of the pane. The map holds one fixed shape, so a pane that changes its proportions would bend in the wrong places. Scale it evenly instead.

How the card in the video opens

The card starts as a dot, stretches into a capsule and opens sideways into the full card. Because the glass cannot change its size, the opening is a separate MotionUI rectangle rig: a light fill with a white edge whose Width and Height sliders grow from dot to capsule to card. When it reaches full size, the real glass fades in on top within about a third of a second and the opening shape fades out.

Then the content follows: the temperature with a blur reveal, the date and details as whole layers sliding up, the high and low pills scaling in from 85% and the day row staggered by 0.06 seconds. All of it uses MotionUI building blocks, so every keyframe stays editable.

6. Or let Claude build it from the notes

With MotionUI connected to Claude, you can skip the keyframing. Try: “Animate the weather card in my open comp following the notes under the Figma frame. Keep the glass live.” Claude reads the notes, animates the layers with the MotionUI tools and renders a few frames to check its work. You can change any keyframe by hand afterwards.

The weather card in the video was animated this way, from the notes in the screenshot above.

Limits to know

• The width and height of the pane cannot be animated. Scale it evenly, or use a separate shape for openings.

• The color fringes from Figma’s dispersion setting are not rebuilt.

• Tilting the pane in 3D is not supported. The glass is a flat layer.

• Fonts must be installed on your computer. Figma loads fonts from the web, After Effects does not. Our day row arrived in a fallback font until we switched it to SF Mono.

Frequently asked questions

Can After Effects open Figma’s Glass effect?

Not on its own. After Effects has no importer for Figma files. A PNG export keeps the look but not the refraction. MotionUI rebuilds the glass as live After Effects layers.

Does the glass work over video?

Yes. The glass layer refracts everything below it in the layer stack, footage included, also while it moves.

Do I need Claude?

No. The import and the animation tools work by hand. Claude helps when you want the animation built from your notes.

A short reference of the glass layers is in the help article Bring Figma Glass into After Effects. For other ways to move designs across, see Figma to After Effects: 5 ways compared. Try it with one of your own frames: get started with MotionUI.