Everything in this repo is free: small scripts for After Effects and Cinema 4D, and the Windows and Deadline tasks around them, written by hand or with AI assistance. If they save you time, please consider taking a look at our paid plugins on aescripts and store.chroma.london:
- Gulp — CGI shot builder for AFX
- VoxMark
- VoxMark for Cinema 4D
- Redshift Light Manager
- Redshift ID Manager
- Octane to Redshift Converter
- SuperSolo for C4D
- Mega Bundle
Each area has its own page, because each one goes deep enough to deserve it.
| Chroma Utilities | Dockable panel: duplicate a layer and strip its keys, parent it back, transfer expressions between layers, build numbered shot folders |
| Chroma Utilities Mini | The same tools as one row of square buttons, for a strip above the timeline |
| Chroma Purge After Render | Watches a render and clears the disk cache when it finishes |
| Export Shapes to C4D | Shape layers to JSON with their animation baked, for the Cinema 4D importer |
| kBar buttons | The same tools as nine one-action scripts, and an importable toolbar — own page |
| VR Color Gradients 3D | A C++ effect plugin: the stock VR gradient, with a Z axis on every point. Built for Windows and macOS — own page |
| Import AE Shapes | Rebuilds After Effects shape layers as splines, Sweeps and Trim-Paths growth |
| XPresso tooling | Find the node for a selected object and back again, plus the diagnostics behind them |
| Bulk object scripts | Instances and connect-and-delete, one at a time rather than all at once |
| Chroma Utilities plugin | The C4D-side plugin — own page |
| C4D migration | Moves a Cinema 4D setup from one release to the next (legacy — superseded) |
| Deadline custom delay | Takes a workstation out of the farm for a couple of hours and puts it back |
| Shutdown / standby | Delayed shutdown or suspend, for the end of an overnight render |
- XPresso API notes — what changed in the 2026 API, and why older forum examples break. Read this before writing new XPresso tooling.
After Effects — copy the contents of aftereffects/ into the matching folders inside the After Effects install. The tree mirrors After Effects' own layout, so it is a straight folder copy, and scripts placed there survive updates. Full steps, including the kbar/ exception and the one preference Chroma Purge After Render needs: After Effects → Installing.
Cinema 4D — drop the .py files into the user scripts folder and run them from Extensions → User Scripts. Full steps: Cinema 4D → Installing.
kBar — import aftereffects/kbar/Chroma Utilities.kbar and all nine buttons arrive as one toolbar with the scripts inside it, so there is nothing to install first: kBar → Installing.
Plug-ins — plugins/vr_color_gradients_3d/ holds both builds: ChromaVRGradient3D.aex for Windows and ChromaVRGradient3D.plugin (universal) for macOS. Copy the right one into After Effects' Plug-ins/Effects/ and restart; it appears under Effect → Immersive Video.
Windows — double-click. They all prompt for their input, so there are no arguments to remember.
The After Effects scripts were written against After Effects 2026 using ExtendScript and the classic app API. They use only the File/Folder API for disk work — no shell calls and no platform branches — so they run on macOS and Windows alike. Anything version-dependent, notably the disk cache preference key, is probed at runtime rather than hardcoded.
The XPresso scripts were written and tested against Cinema 4D 2026 / Python 3.11, using the classic c4d API and c4d.modules.graphview. Several API surfaces changed in ways that break older forum examples — those differences are documented in docs/xpresso-api-notes.md, which is worth reading before writing any new XPresso tooling.
VR Color Gradients 3D is a compiled effect plugin rather than a script, built against the After Effects SDK 25.6. Both builds ship in the repo — nobody should need Visual Studio or Xcode to use an effect — with the source beside them in src/: a Windows x64 .aex, and a universal (arm64 + x86_64) macOS .plugin, ad-hoc signed. Neither has been run in After Effects yet.
The batch and command files are Windows-only.