Shaders apply either as fills that generate patterns, gradients, and textures, or as effects that modify how a layer looks, and both animate on keyframes. The last 10 seconds are the interesting part: you can describe the motion to the Figma agent and have it apply the shader with a first set of keyframes for you to adjust.
Piers Cowburn opens his shaders file for Show Your Work series. The interesting trick: regular Figma effects apply after shaders, so to blur something before the shader reads it, you have to wrap it in a frame. Those soft gray fringes are exactly what his mosaic shader converts into color and shape.
Rogie King on how generative shaders went from a vibe-coded “FigGPU” prototype to the Config keynote in two months. The detail I keep coming back to: progressive blur took the Figma Draw team months to build, and Rogie recreated the same effect with one or two prompts. He’s also honest about what didn’t work – his working prototypes were great for designers and useless as references for engineers, PMs, and stakeholders, so the team backed up to static Figma mocks to get alignment first.
The Config announcements filled out. Shaders can now be animated and reactive to mouse movement, both shaders and generative plugins can be published to Community, a code viewer lets you read and download the code behind any shader, and MCP read/write access.
An hour with Miggi covering the full surface of Figma Motion: keyframes and eases, anchor points, easing and timing variables, loop tracks, motion paths, trim path on strokes, shader effects and fills, and a first look at 3D transforms. If the playlist above is the primer, this is the deep end, and there’s a community file to follow along in. One EDU caveat worth knowing: the Figma agent isn’t available on Education, so students work with the prebuilt shader presets instead of prompting their own.
Figma’s microsite for exploring the new Shader Fills feature announced at Config 2026. You can prompt, stack, and customize shader effects directly in the browser, then take what you’ve built back into the canvas. It’s a smart way to onboard people to a feature that could otherwise feel intimidating, and it doubles as a demo that shows off what the feature is actually capable of.