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NEW Maxon Updates + This Tool Fixes Blender Materials FOREVER | Motion Mondays
Lottie Creator 2.0 takes aim at interactive animation workflows, Crayon Box brings smart material tools to Blender, and Maxon drops procedural scratches in Redshift 2026.8.
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This week, Lottie Creator 2.0 introduces an in-browser keyframe graph editor and state machines, signaling a clear push toward interactive UI motion design. Maxon released Redshift 2026.8 featuring a new procedural Scratches shader alongside animated zoom lenses in Red Giant Real Lens Flares, and Crayon Box brings workflow shortcuts borrowed from Cinema 4D and Substance Painter.
Also this week, Blender users get two major tooling updates: Physical Atmosphere² brings multi-scattering cloud simulations, and InstaMAT expands its free texturing toolkit with native 2D UV painting support. Plus, School of Motion launched Type Chopper, a free After Effects tool for splitting and staggering type layers, while Kiri Innovations brings free 3D Gaussian Splatting directly into After Effects. Rick Gude drops a free mesh clipping plugin for Cinema 4D, and LucyLive enables real-time AI render previews directly in the C4D viewport. Show notes and links below!
Did you know?
School of Motion has two FREE courses!
Path to Mograph is an in-depth look at a career as a Motion Designer, aimed at students who are ready to start their mograph journey.
Level Up is for motion designers who've already gotten started, but need to figure out the next step in their career.
If you decide to take the plunge into All-Access, then you'll also get access to our Jobs Board, as well as monthly livestreams and workshops with industry experts!
All that on top of joining our amazing SOM Community, and access to ALL of our courses, with unlimited (real human!) coursework critiques!
🎓 SCHOOL OF MOTION COURSES MENTIONED
🗒️ SHOW NOTES
🎨 ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
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After Effects Kills FX Console & Junior Artists Feel the Pinch | Motion Mondays
Adobe just quietly started eating its own plugin ecosystem, a Japanese fashion company handed Blender a Houdini-grade cloth solver for free, and there's a talent gap in this industry that's been building for a decade.
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Blender's Photoshop Compositing + a New After Effects Cloner Tool | Motion Mondays
This week we're diving into Blender 5.0's official beta release with all those mograph-style geometry node presets everyone's been waiting for, plus a free compositing toolset called Easy Photorealism that brings Photoshop-like controls right into Blender's compositor.
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After Effects Killed Roto Brush + Unreal 5.8 Is Out | Motion Mondays
After Effects replaces Roto Brush with AI masking, Unreal Engine 5.8 ships with true 3D terrain sculpting and an experimental vibe-coding plugin, and Epic shares their AI concept pipeline to very mixed reactions.