Maxon Red Giant

Maxon Red Giant is a series of professional plugins developed by MAXON. Historically, it is a collection of former effect suites by the RedGiant company, who were purchased and absorbed into Maxon around 2020. These suites existed as separate products until mid-2024 with the release of Red Giant 2024.2.0.

Red Giant includes all of RedGiant's supported collections except for Universe, which now goes under Maxon Universe. It also does not include the Effect Suite, which was discontinued in 2019.

Due to this reshuffling, the suite names are no longer used, however will still be used for this article for clarity and historic reasons.

Trapcode Suite

Effects in the Trapcode Suite allow for the manipulation of 3D space to fit any need. This includes abstract (or imported) 3D shapes, terrains, particle arrays, anything you can think of!

Most Trapcode plugins are only compatible with After Effects, however there are few exceptions. The last version released before being absorbed into Red Giant was Trapcode Suite 2024.2.2.

Echospace

Echospace is more of a scripting tool than an effect, but still needs to be placed in a layer to work. It allows you to easily create manual Trails by automatically placing each layer with respective spatial and temporal distortion.

Horizon

Allows for the creation of infinite 3D "skyboxes" in After Effects.

Mir

Mir is a plugin that's intended use is for generating 3D fractal terrain. However it can be very easily manipulated to do many kinds of 3D fractal distortion. In Mir 3 and newer, you can also import 3D models to work with as well.

Setting Up for Textures

Because of Mir's intended use case, the defaults already have it set up for fractal terrains. However when working with textures this may not be an ideal starting point. Set the following values to prepare it for working with textures.

• In the "Geometry" category, set the "Size X" and "Size Y" to the X and Y of the layer you are using. If using Mir 3 or newer, make sure "Size" is set to "XY Individual" is enabled so these can be changed.
• In the "Texture" category, set the "Texture Layer" to the layer of choice (usually the layer the effect is applied to.)
• In the "Fractal" category, set "Amplitude" to 0.
• In the "Material" category, set "Diffuse Holdout" to 0.
• In the "Shader" category, set the "Shader" to Smooth, "Blend" to "Normal" and "DepthBuf" to On.

You should now see the layer appearing as if no effects were applied at all.

Using Mir as a Replicator

Starting from the Texture Set-Up, Under the "Texture" tab you can change the scale of the texture's X and Y. This works as a very versatile replicator that can be finely controlled. Keep in mind that it is not centered; the anchor point is the top left (0,0)!

Particular

Particular is a very powerful Particle Generator.

Tao

Tao is another 3D shape generation tool, designed to create shapes along splines. Has similar fractal manipulation features to Mir.