Bring Figma Glass into After Effects

Figma’s Glass effect blurs and bends whatever sits behind a frame. When you send that frame to After Effects with MotionUI, the glass does not turn into a flat picture. It arrives as live layers, so it keeps refracting text, shapes and video that move underneath it.

Send a frame with Glass

1. Add the Glass effect to a frame in Figma, as you normally would.

2. Keep the MotionUI app running and open the MotionUI plugin in that Figma file.

3. Open the target composition in After Effects. Without an open composition, MotionUI creates one from the frame.

4. Select the frame and click Send selection.

5. Move a layer under the glass and preview. The glass bends it while it moves.

What arrives in After Effects

Each glass pane becomes a small group of layers named after the Figma layer. A frame called Card gives you:

• Card glass: an adjustment layer with Gaussian Blur and Displacement Map. It refracts every layer below it, video included. This is the layer you animate.

• Card glass shade, Card glass sheen and Card glass rim: vector layers for the light. Lower their opacity if the glass looks too bright.

• Card glass map: a hidden precomp with the shape of the pane. It follows the glass layer by expression, so you can leave it alone.

The frame’s own layers are parented to Card glass and move with it.

Animate the glass

Animate position, scale and rotation on the glass layer. Shade, sheen, rim and content follow. Only layers below the glass in the layer stack are refracted, so keep the background, the video or the text you want bent underneath it.

Current limits

• Animating the width or height of the pane does not work, because the map holds one fixed shape. Scale the glass layer instead.

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

• Glass needs MotionUI 2.0.3 or newer. If the glass is missing after an import, update the app and run the Figma plugin again.

Do I need Claude?

No. Glass comes over with a normal Send selection. Connect Claude when you want help animating the scene around it.