Stipple
Stipple is a plug-in for Adobe After Effects that let's AE users create temporally coherent Image Stippling patterns driven by footage using a physics simulation. It's a lot of fun!
Stipple Trailer credit to Simon Bronson.
What is Image Stippling?
Stippling is an artistic technique that recreates images or patterns using small dots. They can be placed densely or spread out to achieve the detailed shading necessary. In the digital realm, Stippling can be seen as an extension to Dithering with much more visually appealing results.
How is it different from Dithering?
While both stippling and dithering involve creating images with patterns, dithering uses randomized pixel patterns, resulting in a noisy appearance. In contrast, stippling produces cleaner, more aesthetically pleasing shading using small dots, generating *blue noise* rather than the *white noise* of dithering.
Physics Simulation
Stipple sets itself apart by ensuring Temporal Coherence — dots move predictably between frames in a timeline. This is achieved through a physics simulation that makes the dots interact with each other and the image map, maintaining a consistent and coherent visual effect when applied to a video/animated footage.
Fun Features
Stipple offers a range of exciting features:
Footage Driven
Drive the movement of the points using only footage.
Colors & Size
Map dot size and color to their velocity.
Sprites
Use custom sprites for unique effects.
Stretch
Stretch dots to create dynamic trails
Explore many more creative options in the detailed documentation.
Examples
Please watch the sample demos - it's the best way to understand what this effect does.
GPU Accelerated
Stipple simulation and rendering utilizes GPU extensively and a wide variety of GPUs are supported.
Designed for AE
Stipple was designed from the ground up to take advantage of After Effects’ new multi-threaded architecture and Multi-Frame Rendering (MFR) to utilize aggressive caching and blazing fast Render Performance.
(Distributed by aescripts + aeplugins)
Compatibility
Stipple is compatible with Adobe After Effects CC 2021, CC 2022, CC 2023, CC 2024 & above on both Windows (Windows 10 or above) and Macintosh platforms (macOS 10.13 or above).
Apple Silicon Native
Apple Silicon is natively supported with amazing render performance.
Support
If you are having a support issue for any of the products, please contact us for a quick response.
If you want to make yourself familiar with Stipple checkout our Tutorials page and also the Documentation.
Sample Projects
Get started by downloading sample projects for the demos on this page. Download Sample Projects
Download
Version: 1.0.2
Last Updated: Aug 01 2024