Authoring plugins

Plugins are a way to extend the functionality of Motion Canvas.

Motion Canvas consists of two parts running in separate environments: a Vite development server running on Node.js and an editor running in the browser. Browser-related code can be split further into two parts:

• Runtime - all the logic necessary to play the animation, such as the Player instance, Scene definitions (including the actual source code of your animation), etc.
• Editor - the interface that lets you preview the animation, edit the settings, etc.

Depending on your needs, you can extend any of these parts with a plugin:

📄️ Runtime

Extend the runtime components like scenes and the player.

📄️ Editor

Extend the editor interface with Preact.

📄️ Node.js

Extend Vite and the Node.js server.

Plugin examples

You can take a look at our FFmpeg plugin for an example of a fully-fledged plugin. It's runtime portion provides the editor with a Video exporter that sends the rendered frames over to Node.js. The server portion then uses FFmpeg to convert the frames into a video.