Installation
One download, both systems. Unzip it and you get an install guide (RIFTGlass-Install.pdf, the same steps as below), aRIFTGlass WIN folder and a RIFTGlass MACfolder.
Windows
- Quit After Effects.
- Copy
RIFTGlass.aexinto the After Effects plug-ins folder:C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects [version]\Support Files\Plug-ins\Windows asks for administrator permission — press Continue. - Start After Effects. The effect appears under Effect › CloudRift › RIFT Glass.
macOS
RIFT Glass is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS blocks it once it has been downloaded from the internet. Step 2 removes that block from this one file.
- Double-click
RIFTGlass-mac.zip. You getRIFTGlass.plugin, usually in your Downloads folder. - Unblock it before copying it anywhere. Open Terminal (Cmd+Space, type Terminal, Return) and type this with a space at the end — do not press Return yet:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantineDragRIFTGlass.pluginfrom Finder into the Terminal window; its path appears after the command. Press Return. Nothing is printed, which means it worked. - Quit After Effects.
- In Finder open Go › Applications › Adobe After Effects [version] › Plug-ins and drag
RIFTGlass.plugininto it. macOS asks for your Mac password: that folder belongs to the system, so it is normal. - Start After Effects. The effect appears under Effect › CloudRift › RIFT Glass.
Copied it before step 2 and After Effects does not show it? Run this in Terminal instead (it asks for your Mac password, and shows nothing while you type it), changing 2026 to your version:sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Plug-ins/RIFTGlass.plugin"
Your licence key
The effect works in full without a key, with a watermark over the picture. Entering your key removes it.
- Select the layer with RIFT Glass. In Effect Controls the first row reads License: not activated.
- Press Activate…, paste the key from your purchase page or email, and press Activate. The watermark goes.
- One key works on up to two computers.
- To move to a new computer, open the same window on the old one and press Deactivate first. This needs the internet: without it nothing changes, and the window says so.
- The plug-in checks the licence about once a day. Without the internet it keeps working for seven days.
To update, quit After Effects and replace the file. To uninstall, quit After Effects and delete it.
Your first glass
Thirty seconds, and it tells you almost everything about how the effect thinks.
- Put some footage in a composition.
- Make a new adjustment layer above it, Layer › New › Adjustment Layer.
- Drop RIFT Glass on the adjustment layer.
A rounded panel appears in the middle of the frame, and the footage refracts through it. That is the built-in Panel, on by default so the effect does something the moment it lands.
Drag Position to move it, or Width, Height and Radius to reshape it. Everything else adjusts how the glass behaves rather than where it is.
How it decides the shape
There is no mode switch. The effect looks for a shape in a fixed order and uses the first one it finds.
- The Panel, while Use panel is ticked. This is the default.
- Masks drawn on the layer itself, once the Panel is off.
- Layers assigned to the shape slots, if there are no masks.
If none of those turn up anything, the frame passes through unchanged. Untick Use panel and the shape group unlocks; tick it again and the group greys out, because the Panel has taken over.
Panel
A rounded rectangle described by numbers rather than drawn. It is the fastest route to a UI card, a lower third or a button, and it stays perfectly smooth at any size because its edge is calculated rather than rasterised.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use panel | on / off | on | Turns the parametric panel on. Off unlocks the shape group. |
| Position | % | 50, 50 | Centre of the panel. Keyframe it to move the glass. |
| Width | 20 - 8000 | 600 | Panel width in pixels. |
| Height | 20 - 8000 | 360 | Panel height in pixels. |
| Radius | 0 - 2000 | 120 | Corner rounding. Past half the short side the panel becomes a capsule. |
Shape layers
Anything with an alpha channel can be the glass: a shape layer, text, a logo, a vector, a pre-comp. Untick Use panel, open Shape group, and pick a layer in Shape 1.
There are eight slots. Fill several and they become one piece of glass, not eight overlapping ones, the effect merges them into a single silhouette before it computes anything optical, so the bevel runs round the outside of the whole group.
Merge
With several shapes in play, Merge makes them behave like drops of liquid: as two shapes approach, a neck grows between them and they fuse into one body of glass.
The value is roughly how far apart, in pixels, two shapes start reaching for each other. At 0 they are a plain union and touch only where they actually overlap.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shape 1 - 8 | layer | None | Layers whose alpha becomes glass. |
| Merge | 0 - 400 | 0 | Reach of the smooth union between shapes. |
Scale and Look iOS
Two controls at the very top, before any group.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | 10 - 500 | 100 | Master size of the whole optic, thickness and bevel together. Use it to keep a look consistent when the same setup moves between a 1080p and a 4K comp. |
| Look iOS | on / off | off | An Apple-style soft glass preset. |
Look iOS sets only the refraction character: IOR, thickness, bevel and dispersion. Blur, tint, glass colour, specular and the shadows stay exactly where you left them, so the preset is a starting point rather than a takeover.
Refraction
The physics. These five decide how light actually bends, and they matter far more to the result than anything cosmetic further down the panel.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thickness | 2 - 200 | 50 | How deep the glass is. Higher displaces the background further, the single biggest lever on how heavy the glass feels. |
| Bezel | 2 - 200 | 60 | How far in from the edge the surface curves before it flattens. Small values give a sharp, machined lip; large values give a dome. |
| IOR | 1.0 - 3.0 | 1.5 | Index of refraction. Real glass is about 1.5, water 1.33, diamond 2.4. At 1.0 light passes straight through and the glass disappears. |
| Dispersion | 0 - 4 | 0 | Splits red and blue by slightly different amounts, the way a prism does. A little reads as expensive optics; a lot reads as a broken monitor. |
| Edge softness | 0 - 20 | 1.5 | Softens both the silhouette and the refracted band at the rim. Raise it when the edge looks cut out rather than moulded. |
Surface
Frosting and colour.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blur | 0 - 40 | 1.5 | Frosts what shows through. This is what turns clear glass into the translucent panels used behind UI. |
| Tint | 0 - 100 | 8 | How strongly the glass is coloured. |
| Glass colour | colour | white | The tint colour. White at a low tint lifts and milks the glass rather than colouring it. |
Specular
A directional highlight along the rim, as if a light source sat off to one side. Off by default, the subtle highlight most looks want already comes from Reflection in the optics group.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specular | 0 - 1.5 | 0 | Strength of the rim highlight. |
| Light angle | angle | −55° | Which way the light comes from. |
| Light width | 0.05 - 1.0 | 0.4 | How far around the rim the highlight wraps. |
| Specular colour | colour | white | Highlight colour. |
Inner and outer shadow
Depth cues. The outer shadow lifts the glass off the background and is on by default; the inner shadow sits the rim into it and is off.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enable inner shadow | on / off | off | Turns the inner shadow on. |
| Inner colour | colour | black | Inner shadow colour. |
| Inner opacity | 0 - 100 | 50 | Strength. |
| Inner radius | 1 - 200 | 30 | How far in from the rim it reaches. |
| Inner angle | angle | 125° | Which side of the rim it falls on. |
| Enable outer shadow | on / off | on | Turns the outer shadow on. |
| Outer colour | colour | black | Outer shadow colour. |
| Outer opacity | 0 - 100 | 50 | Strength. |
| Outer spread | 2 - 200 | 28 | How far the shadow reaches beyond the glass. |
Optics
The details that separate real glass from a displacement map. Their defaults are already the look most people want, and they are worth understanding before touching.
| Parameter | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibrancy | 0 - 250 | 125 | Heavy blur drags every colour toward grey. Vibrancy pushes them back out, which is what makes frosted glass glow with the colour behind it instead of looking dirty. |
| Reflection | 0 - 300 | 55 | Fresnel reflection, real surfaces reflect more light the more steeply you look across them, which is why glass edges are always brighter than glass faces. |
| Edge stroke | 0 - 100 | 25 | A crisp bright line just inside the silhouette. Reads as a polished edge catching the light. |
| Edge stroke width | 0.25 - 12 | 1 | Thickness of that line, in pixels. |
| Grain | 0 - 100 | 25 | Micro-texture across the surface. It also breaks up banding in smooth gradients, so a little is usually better than none. |
Quality
How finely the glass is computed. Higher settings render the effect larger internally and average it back down, which cleans up the silhouette and the fine detail inside the refraction.
| Setting | Cost | Use it for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draft (1×) | fastest | Blocking out, rough previews, heavy comps. | |
| Normal (2×) | default | Almost everything. Clean enough for delivery in most cases. | |
| High (3×) | slower | Large glass, slow moves, anywhere the edge is on screen long enough to study. | |
| Max (4×) | slowest | Stills and hero frames. |
Recipes
Starting points. Every one of them assumes the defaults, changing only what is listed.
Frosted UI card
The look behind app panels and lower thirds.
- Blur
12, Tint15, glass colour white - Thickness
30, Bezel40 - Vibrancy
150, Edge stroke35
Heavy optical glass
A thick paperweight sitting on the footage.
- Thickness
120, Bezel90, IOR1.8 - Dispersion
0.6, Blur0 - Outer spread
60
Liquid blobs
Several shapes flowing into each other.
- Two or more circles in the shape slots, animated toward each other
- Merge
150 - Look iOS on, Reflection
90
Debug view
Shows the effect's raw working instead of the finished glass. Mostly useful when something looks wrong and you want to know whether the shape reached the effect at all.
- Off: normal rendering.
- Input alpha and Input RGB: what the effect actually received.
- Resolved form: the silhouette it settled on. If this is empty, no shape was found.
- Distance field and Form ×64: the internal distance map the bevel is built from.
- Padded field: the same field including the working margin outside the frame.
Leave it on Off for anything you intend to render.
Requirements
| Item | Requirement | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| After Effects | Windows tested on 2023, Mac on 2026 | ||
| Windows | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit | ||
| macOS | macOS 14 or newer | ||
| Mac hardware | Apple Silicon. Intel should work, not tested yet | ||
| Graphics | Any GPU with OpenGL 3.3 | ||
| Colour depth | 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel |
Troubleshooting
Nothing happens when I apply it
Almost always the adjustment layer. The effect needs the composite underneath, and After Effects only supplies that to a layer with the Adjustment Layer switch on. On an ordinary layer the frame passes through untouched.
I see my shape layer on top of the glass
A layer used in a shape slot is read for its alpha only, and stays visible in the comp on its own account. Turn its eye icon off.
The glass is there but nothing bends
Check IOR. At 1.0 there is no refraction by definition. Then check Thickness: very low values displace almost nothing.
The edge looks cut out rather than moulded
Raise Edge softness. If the shape came from artwork with a hard alpha, a value of 2-4 usually settles it.
It is slow on a big composition
Drop Quality to Draft while you work and put it back for the render. Blur is the next most expensive control.
Known limits
- macOS on Intel has not been tested. The macOS build is tested on Apple Silicon (M1 and later) and is expected to run on Intel Macs too, but there has been nothing to test it on. If you are on one, write — it will be checked.
- The macOS build is not notarized yet, so it needs the one Terminal line under Installation.
- Very large Scale: above roughly 400, a faint seam can appear inside the glass, running down the centre and into the corners. It is a property of how the bevel is measured when it grows nearly as wide as the shape itself. Lowering Scale, or raising the corner Radius, avoids it.
- Masks are read from the layer the effect sits on, and only when the Panel is switched off.
Found something this page does not cover, or something the plugin gets wrong? Write, and say which After Effects version and what you were doing.
Report it