After Effects Killed Roto Brush + Unreal 5.8 Is Out | Motion Mondays

After Effects replaces Roto Brush with AI masking, Unreal Engine 5.8 ships with true 3D terrain sculpting and an experimental vibe-coding plugin, and Epic shares their AI concept pipeline to very mixed reactions.

This week: Adobe's big release brings several long-awaited After Effects features: Object Matte replaces Roto Brush, SVG import lands as editable shape layers, and 3D gets Displacement Maps and cinematic Depth of Field. Also Unreal 5.8 adds 3D terrain sculpting with Nanite support, a built-in Toon Shader, full-body Mesh to MetaHuman, markerless motion capture from a single camera, and the experimental MCP plugin for connecting AI models directly into Blueprints. Epic's AI concepting video shows artists using Nano Banana and GenMedia in Photoshop as an iteration layer on top of traditional hand sketches and Blender blockouts... and people had strong feelings.

Also this week: LottieFiles launches Motion System, a workspace-level tool for building consistent animation standards across design teams. Kindred releases DoAnimation a browser-based 2D animation app. Higgsfield drops a Photoshop plugin with automatic layer decomposition for AI-generated images. Mocha Pro 2026.5 ships Point Track ML, an AI tracking model for shots that used to be unsolvable. Jake Bartlett launches Motion Lab, a live community for building AI-powered After Effects tools. Plus we check out RetopoSketch, a sketch-based retopo tool for Blender and RadialZ, a floating radial brush picker for ZBrush.

New Course: Unreal Engine for Broadcast Design

We are excited to release Unreal Engine for Broadcast Design, taught by Jonathan Winbush. The course is built for motion designers who want to bring their work into Unreal for real-time graphics, broadcast packages, and motion design workflows. This is not a general Unreal course - it is built for people who come from After Effects and want to understand what Unreal can actually do for the kind of work they make. Live for All Access members now.

Please Note: Unreal Engine for Broadcast Design 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

• NEW: Unreal Engine for Broadcast Design

• Cavalry Kickstart

• Courses & workshops coming soon

🗒️ SHOW NOTES

• LottieFiles Motion System

• DoAnimation by Kindred

• Unreal Engine 5.8

• Epic AI Concept Pipeline

• Node Ninja for Unreal Engine (FREE)

• Jake in Motion - Motion Lab

• RetopoSketch for Blender

• RadialZ for ZBrush

• Mocha Pro 2026.5

• Higgsfield Photoshop Plugin

• Adobe Creative Cloud Updates

🎨 ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

• Fafa Motion - Running Man (Cavalry)

• Ryogo Toyoda - Roomba Ad

• Blinkink - FIFA/BBC World Cup

• SOM Student of the Week - Seth Jensen (Cavalry Kickstart):

• Seth Jensen's portfolio: