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+ Blender too, in beta

Live Unreal Engine+ Blender too, in beta renders
inside After Effects

ShotLink turns Unreal Engine into a live render source —
layers, passes, cameras, all in your comp. No waiting, no exports, no round trips.

Get ShotLink What it does

Free trial · Windows · AE + Unreal Engine

No Unreal? Try the packaged Earth scene

Try it now

Earth, packaged

A real Unreal scene running live in After Effects — no Unreal Engine needed, just the AE plugin.

Download the scene 600 MB

Two apps. One window. Live.

Adobe After Effects — ShotLink.aep ▸ Comp 1
SHOTLINK
LIVE FROM UNREAL
LIVE · UE 5
T Title / Motion GFX
◆ AE Camera 1
ShotLink · Beauty
ShotLink · Depth
Unreal Engine 5 — ShotLink_Scene
Perspective · Lit 120 fps
Your comp lives in After Effects
Your 3D scene runs in Unreal Engine
ShotLink brings both together in After Effects
The problem

Kill the render–import–repeat loop

Traditional Unreal-to-AE workflows force you to render, import, check the comp, change something, and render again. ShotLink turns that into a live feedback loop.

Without ShotLink Slow

Every change means another round trip through disk.

Render in Unreal→ Import to AE→ Check comp→ Change scene ↺ …and render everything again

With ShotLink Live

Unreal renders straight into your comp while you work.

Unreal renders live↔ Composite in AE ✓ Final render only when you're ready
What it does

Stay in AE. Render in UE.

ShotLink is an After Effects plugin. Pick a camera in your running Unreal scene, and its render appears as a layer in your comp.

Not just a flat frame: click a point and a 3D null lands on that surface. Beauty, depth, normals, object mattes — any pass you can build in Unreal arrives as its own layer, with real alpha.

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. Found a better angle flying around in Unreal? Pull that camera position back into AE as a keyframe.

Turn on Realtime and Unreal keeps sending frames — change a light, a material, the scene itself, and you see it in your comp as you work.

See each feature step by step
Tap for fullscreen

The plugin has two parts — one in After Effects, one in Unreal Engine.
When you move the camera or scrub the timeline:

  1. After EffectsAsks for that frame
  2. ShotLinkMatches Unreal to your comp — lens, time, format
  3. Unreal EngineRenders it in your open project
  4. ShotLinkDelivers it as a layer — up to 32 bpc, with alpha
Requirements

What you need

OS Windows After Effects 2025.2 or newer Unreal Engine 5.6 or newer
Roadmap

Where it's heading

ShotLink is a practical production tool that keeps evolving. On the radar:

→

Unreal parameters in After Effects — anything exposed on a Sequencer track will become a control on the ShotLink layer. Light intensity, material parameters, actor transforms: the goal is to art-direct the scene from your comp, packaged builds included.

→

Fewer trips into the editor — ready-made presets and setup from the After Effects side, so the things you currently switch applications for will be one control away.

→

macOS support — ShotLink is Windows-only today. Mac is in the works.

→

AE objects into Unreal — sending nulls and solids from your composition into the scene as actors or planes.

→

Colour management — Unreal's own colour handling already works; the plan is to pick profiles and OCIO settings from the After Effects side instead of digging through engine defaults.

Who's building it

Two Olegs, from opposite ends of the pipeline

One spent two decades building game engines. The other spent two decades building tools for After Effects. Together, they built ShotLink — a live bridge between Unreal Engine and After Effects.

Oleg Okhrimenko
Oleg Okhrimenko
Co-founder · Developer

Spent a decade at Crytek working on CRYENGINE and Warface, followed by Technical Director roles at Blackwood Games, Wargaming and Pixagon Games, and later Principal Programmer at Playrix. Develops the native Unreal Engine and After Effects plugins, as well as the core streaming architecture that powers ShotLink.

C++ Unreal Engine Engine architecture
Oleg Yarko
Oleg Yarko
Co-founder · VFX & design

Previously Senior VFX Artist at Crytek, GSC Game World and Blackwood Games, and Lead VFX Artist at Pixagon. An Elite Author on Videohive. Creator of Earth3D, an experimental external renderer for After Effects that later evolved into ShotLink. Drives the After Effects workflow, UX and production pipeline, making sure the tools solve real production problems.

After Effects VFX Motion design
FAQ

Questions, answered

Who actually renders the image?
Unreal does. 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 much Unreal do I need to know?
To get going, barely. Open your Unreal project, add a ShotLink camera and drive it from After Effects. You only need to go deeper — into MRQ and console variables — when you want maximum quality.
Can I try it without Unreal installed?
Yes. The packaged Earth scene runs without Unreal Engine, so you can try the After Effects side first. For your own projects you'll need Unreal installed.
Where do the scenes come from?
Anywhere — Fab, Quixel, marketplaces, or your own. The only requirement is adding a ShotLink camera actor to the scene.
Where do I animate the camera?
You animate your After Effects camera and the ShotLink camera in Unreal follows live. You can also pull a camera position back from the Unreal viewport when you find a better angle.
What can I get besides the beauty pass?
Any render pass you can build as an Unreal post-process material, applied per ShotLink camera — common ones like Beauty, Depth and Normal ship as presets. The feed carries alpha, in 8/16/32-bit.
What about the final render?
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.
Do I need a powerful machine?
AE and Unreal run on the same Windows machine — ShotLink connects them through a direct shared-memory bridge, with no disk round-trip or third-party Spout/NDI layer. It's a live, interactive feed, and the framerate scales with resolution — so it's a dial you control: while you're placing the camera, work at a lower comp resolution for a smooth, responsive feed; when you need to judge the look, push the resolution back up. No workstation required — our test machine is just an RTX 4060 laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM).
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. We do use AI as a second pair of eyes — in code review and testing.
Now on aescripts

Get ShotLink

Launch price $149 $199. A free trial is available on aescripts.

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Windows · After Effects 2025.2+ · Unreal Engine 5.6 / 5.7 / 5.8

Installation guide · Support and community on Discord