Figma as the New FUI Standard

As Jayse Hansen demonstrates, the transition from Adobe Illustrator to Figma represents a fundamental shift in the FUI industry. While Illustrator remains a powerhouse for complex vector drawing, Figma provides a collaborative, component-based environment that mirrors modern software development. This is critical for a film like Tron: Ares, where the UI must feel like a living, breathing operating system rather than a static graphic. The ability to use variants and auto-layout ensures that any design changes propagate instantly across the entire project.

Jayse prefers Figma because of its robust auto-layout and component libraries. In the fast-paced environment of a feature film, directors often request layout changes that would take hours to propagate through an Illustrator file. In Figma, Jayse builds global components that allow him to update a single line weight or color palette across hundreds of design iterations instantly. This speed is the backbone of the Tron Ares VFX pipeline: design fast, iterate often. He treats the canvas as a dynamic interface, creating adaptive components that handle data visualization with high-density technical value.

The Bridge: Figma to After Effects with Overlord

Historically, moving designs from Figma to After Effects was a friction-filled process involving SVG exports and messy path imports. Darby Faccinto highlights that for Tron: Ares, they worked directly with Adam Plouff from Battle Axe to refine Overlord. This tool allows designers to push Figma layers directly into After Effects as native Shape Layers, bypassing the manual rebuilding process that plagued older pipelines. This seamless bridge is essential for maintaining the sub-pixel accuracy required for the Grid aesthetic.

This workflow preserves naming conventions and layer hierarchies, which is essential when Darby is managing compositions containing thousands of layers within After Effects. As Jayse points out, the Overlord integration from Battle Axe ensures that parametric shapes, gradients, and even complex Boolean groups translate accurately. This allows the design team to stay in the creative flow in Figma while the animation team begins rigging in After Effects almost immediately. They can push updates through the link without losing existing animation keyframes, a massive leap in technical efficiency.

Animating the Ares Aesthetic: The Technical Setup

Once the vectors are in After Effects, the focus shifts to technical animation and light behavior. Darby Faccinto explains that the Tron look is not just about neon lines: it is about how those lines interact with the virtual lens. One of the key techniques discussed by Jake In Motion is the use of Deep Glow rather than the standard After Effects glow effect. Deep Glow provides a physically accurate inverse-square falloff, which is vital for the "Ares Red" palette used in the film. This plugin handles high-intensity values more gracefully, preventing the "blown-out" look associated with simpler effects.

Managing Layer Density and Expressions

With thousands of active elements on a hero HUD, project management becomes a technical hurdle. Darby uses heavy nesting and pre-comps to keep the main timeline clean. He frequently utilizes Null objects to drive complex global animations, such as the flickering of the Grid or recursive data patterns. To maintain performance within After Effects, Darby avoids heavy expressions where simple keyframes suffice, though he uses linear() expressions to map data values to visual movements, ensuring the HUD feels functional and reactive.

The Grid Logic and Visual Depth

Jayse Hansen emphasizes that the Tron HUD must exist within a 3D space. Designs are not flat; they are projected onto curved surfaces or floating in holographic depth. The team uses the 3D camera and custom displacement maps to "bend" the Figma designs around virtual glass. By using Luma Mattes and alpha channels, they create a sense of internal light refraction, making the UI feel like it is emitting photons from within the film's environment. They often use lat-longs and spherical projections to map UI elements onto the internal helmet visors of the characters, requiring precise sub-steps in the animation to avoid jitter.

Advanced Compositing and Final Polish

The workflow concludes with a heavy emphasis on the optical look. Jayse and Darby do not want the graphics to look like "perfect" digital files. They apply subtle chromatic aberration and lens distortion to simulate the imperfections of real-world cinematography. As Jake In Motion notes, this is what separates professional feature film VFX from standard motion graphics. They use Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks for final color grading on the HUD layers, ensuring the blacks are crushed correctly and the glows bloom into the surrounding plate without washing out the actor's performance.

The team also relies on property locking via custom scripts to ensure that critical design elements are not accidentally moved during the chaotic animation phase. By integrating Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks as the final step in the pre-comp chain, they maintain control over the AOVs and secondary light passes. This technical discipline allows Darby to hand off shots to the final compositing team with confidence that the design intent remains intact.

The Future of FUI Design

The collaboration between Jayse Hansen and Darby Faccinto on Tron: Ares sets a new benchmark for the industry. By adopting Figma and building custom technical bridges via Battle Axe to After Effects, they have eliminated the traditional bottlenecks of UI design for film. This workflow is not just about efficiency: it is about giving artists more time to focus on the storytelling and the specific aesthetic that defines the Tron universe. As Jake In Motion concludes, the combination of Figma's design agility and After Effects' compositing power is currently the most formidable pipeline for high-end motion design.