Evil Edison, Blender 3D is an alternative to AE. In fact Blender is now everything AE should have been years ago. It has physics, real 3d meshes, nodes, layers, masking, ray-tracing, motion tracking, rigging, inverse kinematics, particles, particle hair, smoke and fire simulation, liquid simulation and even a game engine. And it's free. And it's improving more in 3 months than AE in 3 years.
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