Plumebus
Live 3D Smoke & Fire simulation directly in your After Effects timeline
Real-time 3D smoke, right inside After Effects.
Plumebus solves volumetric smoke live on your GPU and draws straight into the comp — so you art-direct the look in seconds instead of pre-rendering, exporting and praying. No roundtripping, no caching, no leaving AE.
Windows & macOS · After Effects 2022+ · GPU accelerated
We know you love to design in-place.
Push a value and watch the volume answer instantly. Plumebus is tuned so the heavy lifting never gets between you and the look you're chasing.
- Instant feedback
- No pre-render
- Scrub freely
- Tweak live
Every parameter, right in the panel.
Emission, forces, simulation, rendering — every control lives in the effect panel and is fully keyframeable. No external window to manage, nothing to round-trip.
- Emission
- Forces
- Simulation
- Rendering
- Lighting
It sims while you scrub.
Move the playhead and the volume re-solves in place at interactive speed. What you preview is exactly what you render — no bake, no surprises.
Built for the shot.
Volumetric depth, light scattering and motion blur that sit naturally over live footage — from a single wisp to a full plume. Emit from a tracked null and it just works.
- Gun smoke
- Cigarette & ambient
- Explosions
- Bug splats
- Fog & mist
- Tire burns
Built for the spot.
Bind smoke to text, shapes and animated 3D layers, then treat it like any other layer. Perfect for transitions, title reveals and looping ambient beds.
- Smoke transitions
- Emit from text
- 3D object trails
- Logo reveals
- Looping beds
Multi-emitter, 3D colliders, AE lights.
Plumebus reads your comp like a native citizen — drive it with multiple emitters, collide it against your 3D layers, and light the volume with your actual After Effects lights.
- Multiple emitters
- 3D colliders
- AE lights
- AE camera
Tweak it fast in the Real-Time Editor.
Pop the simulation out of After Effects into the Real-Time Editor — its own super-realtime window. Block out the look at full speed, untethered from the comp render, then send it straight back to your layer.
- Full-speed viewport
- Live two-way sync
- Iterate, then send back
- No comp re-render
A complete smoke pipeline, in one effect.
Everything you need to simulate, shade and render volumes — no extra plugins, no external apps.
VDB import & export
Bring in OpenVDB caches from Houdini, EmberGen or Blender — or bake your Plumebus sims back out as VDB.
GPU fluid physics
A real Navier-Stokes solver with buoyancy, vorticity and dissipation — running live on your graphics card.
Path-traced rendering
Multi-scatter path tracing for true volumetric depth, soft self-shadowing and physically-based light.
Raymarched renderer
A fast raymarching mode for instant feedback while you art-direct — switch to path tracing for the final.
Collisions & forces
Drive smoke with wind, turbulence and vortices, and collide it against layers, nulls and animated geometry.
Volumetric lighting
Light the volume with colored sources, emission and HDRI ambience — all reading your comp's 3D camera.
Emit from text layers
Pour smoke straight off live AE text — animate the type and the emission follows every glyph and path.
Layer & geometry colliders
Turn AE layers and 3D geometry into colliders so smoke wraps, deflects and pools against your scene.
Preset library
Start from a tuned look — explosion, cigarette, fog, tire burn and more — then dial it to taste.
One smoke engine, two licenses.
Both are perpetual licenses with minor updates included. Go Pro for fire & explosions, particles, VDB playback and the path tracer.
The complete realtime smoke toolset for comp & motion work.
- ◆Full GPU smoke simulation engine
- ◆Raymarch render engine
- ◆Real-Time Editor
- ◆All emitters — sphere, box, mesh, text & layers
- ◆Forces, colliders & AE lights
- ◆40+ presets
Everything in Standard, plus fire, particles & the path tracer.
- ◆Everything in Standard
- ◆Fire, combustion & explosions
- ◆Particle emission
- ◆VDB playback
- ◆Path-traced renderer & tonemap
- ◆Real-Time Editor