Maxon Declares WAR on After Effects!?!? | Motion Mondays

Maxon made a $299 compositing app free, Premiere got a dedicated color workspace, and DaVinci Resolve added a full photo editing application that nobody saw coming.

This week, Autograph is now free for individual artists — Maxon's compositing app built around generators and modifiers instead of layers and effects. Cinema 4D 2026.2 landed alongside it with the Fabric Brush, OpenPBR as the new Redshift default, and a C4D for iPad beta. Premiere's new Color Mode is a three-year project aimed squarely at Resolve's color tools, and Resolve 21 fired back with Lightroom-style photo editing and more. After Effects beta got Curl Noise, a GPU-only organic noise effect, plus a long-overdue anchor point fix.

Also this week, INSYDIUM showed off NeXus rebuilt from scratch for Blender, and FrameRate launched student pricing alongside a preview of their synced multi-user review platform. Frame.io Drive now mounts cloud projects as a local drive, Rive shipped file sharing links and keyframe stagger, and Cavalry's plugin ecosystem keeps growing over at Scenery.io. Two new tools worth grabbing: Easy Torn Paper for After Effects and Retratone, a proper halftone engine for Photoshop. And new on All Access this week: Cinema 4D Insider with EJ Hassenfratz and Cavalry Kickstart with Greg Stewart.

New Course: Cavalry Kickstart

We are excited to release Cavalry Kickstart, a 13-hour foundational course taught by Greg Stewart for motion designers ready to think procedurally and build flexible animation systems that would take hours to set up in After Effects. Learn to create mograph-style effects, dynamic text animations, and responsive templates that update in real time.

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Please Note: Cavalry Kickstart is included as a part of our All-Access and Team Training programs.

New Course: Cinema 4D Insider

We are also excited to release Cinema 4D Insider, a 4-hour professional-level course taught by EJ Hassenfratz that transforms how you work in Cinema 4D — covering faster workflows, scene organization, Redshift mastery, and team-ready production techniques.

LEARN MORE

Please Note: Cinema 4D Insider is included as a part of our All-Access and Team Training programs.

Did you know?

School of Motion has two FREE courses!

Path to Mograph is an in-depth look at a career as a Motion Designer, aimed at students who are ready to start their mograph journey.

Level Up is for motion designers who've already gotten started, but need to figure out the next step in their career.

If you decide to take the plunge into All-Access, then you'll also get access to our Jobs Board, as well as monthly livestreams and workshops with industry experts!

All that on top of joining our amazing SOM Community, and access to ALL of our courses, with unlimited (real human!) coursework critiques!

🎓 School of Motion Courses Mentioned

• School of Motion All-Access

• School of Motion Team Training

• VFX For Motion

• NEW: Cavalry Kickstart

• NEW: Cinema 4D Insider

• Courses & workshops coming soon

🗒️ Show Notes

• Autograph (free)

• Autograph – Getting Started on Cineversity

• Cinema 4D 2026.2 release video

• Cinema 4D for iPad beta

• Premiere Color Mode

• DaVinci Resolve 21

• After Effects new features (Jake Bartlett)

• NeXus for Blender announcement

• Frame.io Mounted Storage

• Suite Studios

• FrameRate student pricing

• Scenery.io (Cavalry plugins)

• Easy Torn Paper

• Retratone

🎨 Artist Spotlight

• Vitor Cervi – ESCAPE

• Victor Verdugo – Anxiety, Chocolate and Keyframes

• Andrew Vucko – Google Cloud work

• Audrey Havey – Sword and Shield

• SOM Student of the Week - Melissa Chen

• Melissa Chen's Instagram