Other voices

This script is simple, but REALLY powerful. If you value precision in your designs, GridGuide is a must–have. Joey Korenman, School of Motion

How guidelines should work in After Effects. Sander Van Dijk

Key Features

• Auto Layout improves your designs – also for people with no design background. Just place your layers roughly where they should be, select them, and click the Auto Grid & Snap button. GridGuide applies fundamental design rules to improve the placement and size of your layers and determines the grid that fits best to your content.
• Modifiable Shape Layer Guides – because motion design isn't static. GridGuide's grids are based on shape layers, which means that you can move, rotate, scale, parent and keyframe them as any other layer. Don't limit yourself to static designs and let your guides follow your motion.
• Intuitive Alignment Tools allow you to align, scale and stretch layers. Just click them several times to let a layer jump from one grid line to the next one. Of course, the alignment tools also work on rotated grids.
• Native, snappable After Effects guides if you prefer guides that you can snap to interactively, you can convert your shape layer guides to native After Effects guides using the Convert Grids to Guides button. There are many ways to create grids in After Effects, but GridGuide is the only automated solution to create truly snappable guides!
• Fully customizable grids including controls for gutter, margin, stroke color, stroke width, and more. Furthermore, GridGuide supports both bounded and infinite grids and grids that consist of horizontal or vertical lines only.
• Single Lines and Crosshairs add even more flexibility to your design. Of course the alignment tools work with those lines, too – even if there are many of them in the composition.

New AE design script 'GridGuide' - I wish Illustrator worked like this! Nice work @mamoworld https://t.co/ZxxmYDMvOi pic.twitter.com/W9Ga1tuFtO

— Jayse Hansen (@jayse_) April 12, 2017

We finally have powerful grid manipulation & snapping tools — @aescripts comes to the rescue where @AdobeAE can't. https://t.co/Wv5KEvkC4r

— Mograph Tips (@mographTips) April 12, 2017

GridGuide is one of those tools that you can integrate into your workflow NOW. No gimmicky fun stuff, it just works. Align Panel on steroids

— VinhSon Nguyen (@CreativeDojo) April 14, 2017

Photoshop required

Why is GridGuide the first extension ever that creates native, snappable guides in Adobe After Effects? Because After Effects does not grant extensions access to its guides – they simply cannot create or modify them. Never the less, GridGuide can still create such guides for you using a clever workaround: In the background it uses some Adobe Photoshop magic, since Photoshop extensions can create guides. What does this mean for you?

If you want to use the "Convert Grids to Guides" function

• Photoshop must be installed on your system
• GridGuide will launch Photoshop if it is not running, yet
• "Convert Grids to Guides" might take a few seconds

You don't need to do anything manually in Photoshop – the entire process of creating the guides is automated. And although it might take a few seconds, it is definitely the fastest way to create snappable guides grids in After Effects.