XR 3D Hologram
Mac only, no Windows version. Download with a free account - created in 30 seconds.
A volumetric hologram, right inside After Effects. Your image is replaced by a grid of luminous elements (balls, squares, crosses...) displaced in depth and seen through a perspective camera: the principle of Card Dance and CC Ball Action, the effects most hologram tutorials are built on. The difference lies in the depth. Tutorials pull it from luminance, and in a photograph the bright sky comes to the foreground while the dark subject sinks away. This plugin computes a real depth map with an embedded AI model: the subject comes forward, the background stays back.
Real depth
"Generate depth map" runs Depth Anything V2 Small on the Neural Engine. The map pivots around the scene's typical depth and takes on the image's fine relief: the subject sits in the right depth order and keeps its grain. The other two modes, luminance or a map on a layer, are instant.
Luminous substance
Eight shapes, from ball to hexagon. The deposit is additive: the substance glows without hiding what sits behind it, which is what makes it read as a hologram rather than a mosaic. Three stacked glows with rising thresholds and radii, for a believable halo. The alpha follows brightness: over a dark background, the layer composites on its own.
Volume in motion
Depth-driven shifts that make the volume read even with a static camera. A twist, Card Dance's point light, a scanner sweeping the Z axis on a loop, and a per-shape twinkle (smooth, flickering or all-or-nothing) that animates with no keyframes, even on a still image.
Requirements
- Recent macOS, Neural Engine enabled
- Apple Silicon or Intel - universal plugin, no Rosetta
- After Effects (SmartFX API, since CC 2015)
- About 50 MB of disk space (embedded depth model)
- No internet connection, no license
License
Personal plugin, distributed as is, without warranty. It embeds the Depth Anything V2 Small depth model, released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Found a bug, got an idea?
Private message, sent directly to Xavier Reyé with the plugin name. Nothing is published. Leave an email address to get a reply.
