Installation.
Get the Altar plugin running inside After Effects in a few minutes.
Prerequisites
Before installing Altar, make sure you have:
- Adobe After Effects 2022 or newer
- macOS 12+ or Windows 10/11
- An AI provider key of your own if you plan to use Altar Chat (Altar never bills you for inference — you bring your own key)
Quick start
Install the ZXP
Download the latest Altar build from motionaltar.com, then install the .zxp
with your preferred extension manager (ZXP Installer or the Adobe UXP/CEP
tooling).
After installing, restart After Effects. Altar appears under Window → Extensions → Altar. Dock it like any other panel — the plugin opens dark, to match AE.
The three panels
Altar is one plugin with three stations:
- Altar Forge — make it by hand (Anchor Align, primitives, rigs)
- Altar Chat — describe it; Altar conjures it
- Altar Vault — grab it pre-made from the cloud library
Verify
Open the panel and run any read-only Forge tool against a comp. If it reports your layers back to you, the Bridge is connected and Altar can see your work.
Next steps
- Read Core concepts — the Bridge to understand how Altar exposes a comp as state and drives writes.
- Try the Altar Chat quickstart to describe your first move.