Bendio

The quick and simple way to bend layers in After Effects.

Bendio is an After Effects plugin for bending layers with the ability to parent other layers to the bend. It’s quick and simple to use and it can work with any type of layer – rasters and vectors.

Download the original project file for this promo here and see how we used Bendio to bend everything!

Bendy bodies. Finally

Bendio is ideal for incorporating bends into chains of parented layers, like character rigs.

Sure, you can kinda do it with puppet pins, but it takes ages to set up, often looks… bad, and is almost impossible to re-adjust after you set the pins.

With Bendio, you just drag attach points to wherever you want them, and move them whenever you need to. There’s a button to generate nulls which follow those points as you bend the layer.

You’ll be up and bending a LOT quicker and more reliably, so you can get on with making beautiful animation.

Bend It Better

The native effect CC Bend It crops a layer so aggressively that you can feel like the effect is dictating how you bend things.

At its core, Bendio has the same simple bend as CC Bend It, but we made it so you can completely remove that cropping, and animate the entire layer bending.

Bendio renders rigid pixels after the end of the bend, so you get an un-distorted section at both ends. You’ll find that things like shoes or torsos are a lot easier to rig this way.

Stay sharp

We love shape layers and .ai layers, and we love them to stay sharp (or continuously rasterized). But effects applied to them don’t move around with the layer when you animate it.

In Bendio, we figured out a way to get the effect to work normally without having to precompose the layer or turn off its 🔆 switch.

Click the Convert To Mask button, and your points become mask points, and stick to the layer, whatever you do to it.

Learn more

Bendio is so simple to use that you probably don’t need to read this. But if you want the nitty gritty, check out the User Guide or watch the YouTube below.