Getting started

Atlas builds real maps as ordinary After Effects layers, from free open data, with no subscription. This page gets you from an empty comp to a finished shot in about ten minutes. The panel's tabs follow the order of the work: Map, Style, Elements, Data and Camera, with Settings behind the gear at the end of the tab bar.

1. Install and open

Install Atlas with the aescripts + aeplugins manager: it installs both parts, the panel and the Atlas Particles effect, from one download. To try before buying, choose Add Trial from the manager's Account menu: the trial lasts 14 days and does everything. Restart After Effects, then Window → Extensions → Atlas. Dock it beside the Project panel; it is happiest about 380 to 600 px wide. (The ZXP/UXP Installer installs the panel only; particles need the manager.) A licence is entered in Settings → About → Licence….

2. Build a map (Map tab)

World builds countries, coastlines, lakes, rivers, borders and more from bundled Natural Earth data, offline. City builds real streets from OpenStreetMap.

1. Open or create the comp you want the map in. Atlas builds into the active comp, or makes one called "Atlas Map" if none is open.
2. Search a place, or drag the preview to pan and wheel to zoom. The dashed frame is your comp. The globe button shows the whole world.
3. Pick a projection (World) or a zoom level (City), a detail level (Auto is right nearly always), and a style.
4. Build the map as: Raster image (the default) for a map you will fly through; Vector shapes for a map you will edit layer by layer (it plays at footage speed and gains sharper zoom levels as a tour zooms in). A raster map can be painted on satellite imagery: choose it under Raster base.
5. Press Build Map. A World map takes a few seconds; a street map a little longer the first time, while its tiles are fetched and cached.

Everything hangs off one null, ATLAS Map Root. Its Centre Lon, Centre Lat and Scale sliders are the map's view; on the globe, Mercator and equirectangular, keyframing them moves the map itself.

3. Make it look right (Style tab)

Pick a preset from the gallery, or open a section and change any colour, width or font. Apply to comp restyles the map already built without rebuilding it, and reaches every layer Atlas made: pins, labels, arcs, highlights, routes. Save your own preset, export it as a file, or import a Mapbox GL or MapLibre style JSON.

Terrain and imagery live here too: a hillshade over any map, NASA or Sentinel-2 imagery, a national aerial survey where one is open, or the day-and-night globe.

4. Put things on it (Elements tab)

Each section adds one kind of thing and stays live as the map moves.

• Pins: search a place, choose a design (drop pin, ring pulse, beacon, callout, badge, photo frame…), Add. Paste a list for many at once, or bring in a table of places from the Data tab.
• Arcs between two pins: great circle, straight or curved, with draw-on, a traveller, an arrowhead, dashes or a hand-drawn stroke, and a live distance label. Hubs fan arcs out from one place.
• Areas and borders: highlight or outline any area: a country, a state or county, a nation or region (Wales, Greater London), a group (the EU), from one search; shown as fill and outline, the outline only, the fill only or a spotlight; with a fade, wipe, draw or pop reveal; several merged into one shape. A click in the Map preview picks the county under the mouse when the view is close, the country otherwise.
• Labels: countries, capitals, places, states, lakes, rivers along their course, airports and ports, laid out to avoid each other. On a street map: street names along the road, districts and points of interest.
• Street routes along the street graph between two pins, with a length label and an elevation profile.
• Range rings around a pin; scale bar, north arrow, locator and a detail inset (a closer map of one place in a corner, with its frame drawn live on the main map).

5. Bring in data (Data tab)

• Import a file (where to find data: Finding data), From a URL (any address that returns GeoJSON, CSV, KML or GPX) or Open data (USGS earthquakes, NASA natural events, a World Bank indicator by country and year, geoBoundaries, OpenFlights airports; free, no key, the credit added for you): GeoJSON, TopoJSON, a shapefile (loose or zipped), a GeoPackage, KML, KMZ, GPX, TCX, FIT, a GTFS transit feed, an Excel workbook, a CSV (with WKT geometry in a column, if it has one) or a JSON table; a folder of dated files reads as one time series. Atlas says what the file holds (areas, a track with times, points, a table with a country column) and offers only what it can become: areas and lines as an image or as editable paths (a national grid is converted for you), a recorded journey as a track that draws on at its own pace, points as pins or a heat map, a table as a choropleth, bubbles or arcs, with a time series and a legend; pins, bubbles, areas and arcs can appear one by one at the time in a column (a front line by year, migrations by date), a heat map can grow over time, a pasted highlight list takes dates ("France 1940"), and an imported layer's labels can read any property or a template of several. Natural Earth themes (ocean depth, glaciers, parks…) sit beside it.
• Particles: data that moves, drawn live in After Effects' renderer by the Atlas Particles effect. A table of journeys, events or positions over time offers Animate as particles; a GeoTIFF grid or a table of values offers a point cloud of spikes or dots; a heat map can be live; arcs, hubs and street routes can be drawn as streams of particles (Draw as: Particles or Both). The Particles section then sets each layer's look, colours, heat and a readout (a clock, counters, bars), and Bake to PNG sequence hands the shot to a machine without the effect.

6. Move the view (Camera tab)

The first tool that needs a camera adds it. Fly to a pin, a country or a place, with tilt and heading. Orbit a place. Tour: move the camera through your stops, or move the map itself through your pins with holds and a pull-back. Follow a traveller along an arc or a route. Camera options keep labels and pins the same size and level as the camera moves, and can remove the camera again.

Then press Update map (beside Build Map). It reads the whole animation, yours and Atlas's, and makes the map reach every edge the camera looks past and stay sharp wherever the map or the camera zooms in. While the map needs updating, a bar above the status line says why, with its own Update map button; when the map is up to date the bar goes. To animate quickly first, tick Draft: Build Map then makes a fast, rough map, and Update map makes the finished one.

From a country to a street, in one press

Camera → Quick: country to street: search the town (add a second and a third for a multi-stop tour), choose where to start (z6 is a country) and where to end (z14 is streets), the base (the style's colours or satellite imagery), the move and hold times, and press Build and fly. Atlas builds the wide map as a Mercator raster World map in the style, pins the places, keys the tour and runs Update map, so the map is a stack of zoom levels sharp all the way down, the closer ones streets from OpenStreetMap. About twenty seconds on a warm cache; the first time fetches a few hundred tiles.

The same by hand, if you want control over each step: Map tab, City, a country zoom, Build the map as Raster image; a pin; Camera → Tour → Move the map with Zoom in to "z14 · streets"; then Update map when the bar above the status line says the map is short.

7. Settings (the gear at the end of the tabs)

Attribution (on by default: any map with OpenStreetMap layers gets a credit layer, as the licence requires), Atlas MCP (an AI app on your computer drives Atlas; one button sets it up in Claude's desktop app), the Fast, Balanced and Quality performance profiles, the tile source (OpenFreeMap online, or a PMTiles region file for offline street maps), the tile cache and where it lives, the rendered images kept beside your project, and place search. About shows your licence or trial (Licence… opens aescripts' licence window), the Atlas Particles effect's version, and Copy diagnostics for a support email.

Things worth knowing

• Undo: everything Atlas adds can be undone in After Effects. A pin with its label is one step; a whole build can take a few Undos, as its finishing touches follow it as steps of their own.
• Live or still: on the globe, Mercator and equirectangular the map follows the Map Root; on the other projections it is still, and Playback → Bake to PNG sequence renders a keyframed move at footage speed. A raster map follows the Root on Mercator and equirectangular whatever its detail.
• Speed: close spare comp viewer tabs before a big build; every open viewer slows every step. A camera makes every map layer 3D, which roughly halves a street map's playback; a raster map does not care.
• Offline: World maps never touch the network. Street maps do once per tile, then read the cache; a region file makes them fully offline.
• Trial and licence: the 14-day trial does everything. When it ends the panel shows aescripts' licence window, and particles rendered without a licence carry a cross; one licence covers the panel and the effect.
• Credits: Natural Earth needs none; OpenStreetMap, the terrain tiles and imagery sources are credited on the attribution layer automatically, and the third-party notices ship with the panel.