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
Run the installer
Head to motionaltar.com/download and grab the installer for your
platform — a .pkg on macOS, a .exe on Windows. Run it; it installs
Altar just for your user, so no admin password is needed.
After installing, open After Effects. Altar appears under Window → Extensions → Altar. Dock it like any other panel — the plugin opens dark, to match AE. Altar keeps itself up to date from inside the panel, so this is the only manual install you’ll do.
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.