Magic Bullet Suite 14 and Trapcode Suite 16

November 17, 2020

It’s a big day at Maxon/Red Giant! We’re releasing huge updates to Magic Bullet and Trapcode Suites.

Trapcode Particular continues to embody our ethos of power and ease-of-use, with a completely modernized simulation engine that allows particles to behave more naturally, with real physics forces working together without limitation. In other words, yes, Air and Bounce finally work together — but it’s so much more than that. Wait until you try the new Air Turbulence controls. We’ve seamlessly combined this with the artistic control you expect, with creative overrides to the real-world physics like the new Velocity Over Life control.

And then there’s the new flocking/swarming controls. You just have to see this stuff in action.

There’s a ton more to see at Red Giant.

For Magic Bullet, we have huge updates to Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista. Colorista gets better HDR handling, visual LUT browser, Saturation EQ, and the ability to create LUTs, among other new features. Looks gets awesome new tools like Color Remap and Huenity, as well as the same visual LUT browser — and a personal favorite of mine: Tangent hardware support. I cooked up some tutorials to show you all the new stuff.

Again, more to watch and read at Red Giant’s blog.

I’m immensely proud of these releases and the amazing teams that created them. And you can get all of this as a part of Red Giant Complete or Maxon One.

Trapcode Suite 15, Featuring Fluid Dynamics

October 30, 2018

Last year, one of the Red Giant engineers presented some research on fluid dynamics to our team. He showed these gorgeous animations of realistic fluid motion. Only they weren’t animations — they were simulations, running in real time on his laptop.

This became the foundation of today’s update to the Trapcode Suite. Both Particular and Form now feature real-time fluid dynamics. You simply have to try it to believe it. I’m still wrapping my brain around all the possibilities.

We love bringing exciting new features to Trapcode, but we agonize over each new capability too, because the hallmark of Particular has always been the amazing, powerful things you can do quickly and easily, without feeling like you’re learning a new 3D application. What I think I’m most proud of our team for is making a fluid dynamics engine that’s fun and easy to use, but powerful enough for serious work.

And a funny thing happened as we were adding support for OBJ emitters in Particular and base-forms in Form — we accidentally also added support for OBJs in Trapcode Mir. Which means that Mir can now render 3D objects. Finally there’s a lightweight way to render simple 3D geometry in After Effects. You can even use camera projection to texture these OBJs.