Maxon’s Red Giant Trapcode
We continue our exploration of Maxon One’s suite of tools, which we started in last month’s issue. We’ll begin with Trapcode, which isn’t really a tool in itself so much as it is a sub-suite of tools that mostly orbits around design-y effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro: Particular (particle systems), Form (particle grids and objects), Mir (3D terrains and wireframes), 3D Stroke (3D shapes and lines), Shine (light ray effects), Starglow (glints and glows), Sound Keys (audio-driven animation), Tao (3D objects along paths), Lux (in-camera lights), Echospace (cloning layers) and Horizon (360 background). Yes, you’re right — It’s a lot!
Let’s begin with the easy one: A ground plane was added into Particular for bounce calculation. Not only does this speed up the setup, but because it’s built into the system tools, it can be part of presets, which incidentally can now be saved as custom presets. In previous releases, you had to set up AE layers and then attach that to the Particular system. This doesn’t mean layer integration went away — you still have that ability. You can also use up to three layers, along with the internal ground plane for four particle bounces.
More substantially, we now have child-inheritance upgrades. Particles could be emitted from different parents before, but now you can inherit a number of different variables from those parents — including size, opacity and particle type. This adds a lots of variations, but it’s not limited just to the inheritance override. You still have animation control curves for opacity and size on top of the parents’.
Another subtle but powerful change is that more multiple color gradients are now available to choose from when driving particle color interpolations. The RGB gradient is all well and good, but if you are moving through the color wheel, things get a little dull and muddy. So now you have choices of HCL, LAB or HSV gradients to choose from for more interesting paths through the color range.
In the 2024 update, Particular has a new Combustion fluid dynamics choice for burning and explosions. With Stroke from Parent, Particular can generate lines from particles quickly with less overhead. Previously, you had to generate a multitude of particles to get them to feel like solid lines.
Particular, Form and 3D Stroke have also received updates to the control curves with a mirror mode that give you the ability to make symmetrical effects with minimal fuss and time.
Sound Keys now has a new UI update that more closely reflects the workflow and functionality of the other tools, like Particular. Overall, these are pretty cool additions, especially the Particular ones.
Maxon’s Red Giant Magic Bullet
Magic Bullet is defined as collection of color-correction and process nodes: Looks (look development), Colorista (color correction), Cosmo II (beauty and skin adjustments), Denoiser III (fo denoising), Renoiser (for use after denoising), Film (for film emulation) and Mojo II (another flavor of look-development like Looks, but nowhere near the same amount of control). It has had a pretty strong foothold in film, commercials and design, and since it became part of the Maxon family it continues to move forward. This collection of plugins grew up in After Effects and Premiere, but it can also be found in Final Cut and Avid. Because it comes as an OpenFX plugin as well, it can be used in Resolve and Nuke too.
We’ll begin with Looks since it has generated the most attention over the past year. It is basically a color- and look-development process, which is a sequence of processes that you add to your footage to build a look. The footage comes into the input node where the color space is set, the processes are added, and then it goes out through the output node, where the color space is set back. This flow would be familiar to Resolve users, without the option of parallel streams. But while you can build looks from scratch, the power lies in the huge library of preset looks that you can quickly audition. The presets are collections of those nodes, not black boxes, and so once a look is chosen, you can dive into the parameters and start to tweak and refine.
With this new version, users can add Looks presets to the library — which are referred to as Capsules. The Capsules have cloud support, so updates and preset management are automatic. 30-plus presets have been added in the 2024 update. Additionally, full ACES support and OCIO color management have been incorporated, which is critical for modern VFX and film color pipelines.
Magic Bullet Looks isn’t limited to color and compositing tools. There is also an Unreal Engine Magic Bullet plugin, which installs if you have Unreal already on your system. As far as I can tell, it’s set to active by default. The plugin lives as a Post Process Volume, and the interface itself is exactly the same as it is in the other host software. It works in conjunction with the Cine Camera Actor, so when your camera is within the volume in a Level Sequence, it will apply the Magic Bullet Look to the output. On my system it works in real time, but even on slower systems the render output would have the look baked in. This was implemented back for UE 4.27, and in the 2024 Magic Bullet release, support has been added for 5.2 and 5.3.
Also, in conjunction with other 2023/24 Red Giant updates, Japanese and Chinese languages have been added.
Maxon’s Red Giant VFX
Maxon’s Red Giant VFX suite is a collection of tools — composite finessing and balancing, chroma keying, tracking and cleanup, glow and flares, and distortions — created to make VFX work easier. I consider the flagship to be Supercomp, which acts like an adjustment layer on top of the rudimentary comp layers and was developed by VFX supervisor and Red Giant’s Chief Creative Officer Stu Maschwitz. This is almost like an integration layer which is about balancing blacks, edge blurs, light wraps, haze and diffusion. If you are an After Effects compositor, this should definitely be part of your toolbox. But in the latest update of VFX Suite, the star is Real Lens Flares.
Flares are always cool, just ask J.J. Abrams. But they are tricky to get right and they are dynamic, which means they change as the shot changes. The latest update includes a handful of tools to make this more straightforward. Let’s take a look:
First thing to note is that you can now have flares driven by After Effects lights. This gets the flare to be generated from a source in 3D space. So, if you have a light tracked to something in the shot, the flare will change based on the movement. This helps more so if a light is moving in Z (toward or away from the camera), because the light source would change size. Furthermore, if the light has some direction to it (like a spotlight), the direction the light is facing is respected. So, you won’t have a lens flare if the light is facing away, but it will flare dramatically when the light is turned into the camera lens.
In the lens flare structure, a ring flare has been added to help with spherical lens. A word of warning: Don’t use this when the lens is anamorphic. Otherwise you might as well turn in your VFX membership card!
Lens dirt, or schmutz, is something we seem to love — despite the wails of protest from the cinematographers and their camera departments. But usually, dirt on the lens isn’t noticed unless it’s lit. Real Lens Flare has an illumination setting so you can light the dirt with your scene lights or the actual background plate, or both together.
And to speed things up, a quality toggle has been added in the layer stack so flares will calculate at one-quarter resolution. This will automagically switch to full quality for final renders.
I should mention that Real Lens Flare can also be used in Premiere.
Website: maxon.net/en/red-giant
Price: $49.91 (per month); $500 (per year)
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist. You can reach him at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.
