Griddy

Griddy, at motionfun.net, is a free After Effects tool from Motion Fun that puts a layout grid on your comp as real After Effects guides. Columns and rows, with a gutter between them and margins around them, land in one click. Because they are After Effects' own guides, they snap, lock and hide like any guide.

The panel shows the grid's columns and rows, the comp's size and how many guides it has, above a preview of the comp. You drag in the preview to change the margins and the gutter, and tiles add or remove columns and rows. Once a comp has a grid, every change reaches the comp at once, and each change is one undo step. Each comp keeps its own grid.

Griddy only places guides. It never moves a layer. Changing the grid or taking it off only touches the guides the grid placed, so guides you dragged out yourself stay where they are. Clear is the one button that removes every guide, and one Undo brings them back. Guides only show in the comp viewer, never in a render or an export.

There are other guides too. Thirds adds rule of thirds guides, the golden ratio with Shift-click, or a cross through the center with Alt-click. Bounds adds guides along the edges and centers of the selected layers. The docs also cover putting a grid inside a layer and saving guides as a preset.

Griddy isn't a separate download. It comes inside Motion Dock, Motion Fun's free panel that holds every Motion Fun tool, and needs After Effects 2022 or newer. Motion Fun also makes Curvy, a curve editor, and Synapse, which draws lines between layers, in the same panel.

Pricing: Free. The Griddy page says it is free forever, with no trial, no watermark and no locked features. It comes inside Motion Dock, which Motion Fun also lists as free forever, and the Motion Dock download asks for no account or email. Checked November 12, 2026 at https://motionfun.net/tools/griddy.