Trapcode Suite by Red Giant is EVERYTHING

Trapcode Suite Adobe AfterEffects Plugins are a Powerful Collection of Tools for Content Design

Start Making Content Now

Anyone who has felt inspired to create digital art quickly realizes that there is a learning curve between ideating and creating. Technology is supposed to help enable artists to express themselves in new ways, but often becoming a content creator requires years of school in graphics animation to produce incredible visuals. Trapcode Suite is the solution for creative artists interested in experimenting with 2D and 3D animated design elements that want to start producing content now. Within an hour of installing Trapcode I had exported my first video file of a basic animated effect. It was nothing to brag to J.J. Abrams or George Lucas, but within a week I had started creating my first galaxies and nebulas using the effect plug-ins Particular and Mir. Trapcode Suite is too much horsepower and complex nuance to discuss even half of the capabilities in one article, but for now, all you need to know is that Trapcode Suite for Adobe AfterEffects is EVERYTHING.

Pre-Visualize Effect Parameter Designer

The most notable thing about this software plugin is how is it ready to rock 'n roll right after installing the plugin in the correct directory and restarting AfterEffects. Simple insert an effect using the following steps; Add Solid > Add Effect RG Trapcode such as Particular.

In the effects parameters click the "Designer..." button to expand the pre-visualizer. This window will enable the live preview of the effects parameters as they are being affected.

Presets are a powerful way to start with effects that can either be custom modified or deconstructed to better understand how to build that effect from scratch. Above is a screenshot of the robust preset gallery which includes great tools such as Light and Magic which can add a finishing touch to text in a brand advertisement. Nature presets include useful particle systems as templates such as falling leaves, snow and the image below is a particle emitter of bird shapes. Simple animations such as 3D falling leaves on top of a static autumn colors photo or white dots slowly failing in-front of a winter landscape, add a polished and professional element to creative projects.

Adobe Workflow

Walk into a room of creative professionals and their is a high probability many of them will be running Adobe Creative Suite apps on a MacBook Pro. Although Apple was for years the default creative laptop, many pro users have turned to PC gaming machines designed for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Even Unity which is platform agnostic often requires more advanced computing rendering power than is configurable with a Mac, requiring rendering house or Amazon Web Services (AWS) level of enterprise computing. Adobe Creative Cloud is PC and Mac compatible, making the platform OS agnostic enabling workflow across teams despite whether "I'm a Mac" or "I'm a PC."

Adobe Creative Cloud features a robust toolkit including the iconic powerhouse Photoshop, which has become a verb used to describe the act of an altering an image. Other notable applications include Adobe Illustrator (Vector Based Drawing), Lightroom (Photo Developing and Editing Suite), Premiere (Video Editing Suite), and AfterEffect (Video Editing and Compositing). All of these and many other programs enable content creation and publishing for creative professionals to bring their ideas to life.

Adobe AfterEffects utilizes Cinema 4D Lite, an entry-level version of the powerful 3D rendering engine Cinema 4D by MAXON. Experienced power users are able to create in C4D Studio professional full versions and import into AfterEffects for finishing touches. AfterEffects allows the beginner eager to start creating content a familiar Adobe workflow combined with basic 3D animation platform without a several thousand dollar initial investment in the software (Adobe has a monthly subscription for Creative Suite, and many 3D animation platforms including MAXON have educational software for free or discount).

There are many great things to love about using AfterEffects, including the ability to export Apple ProRes files with a transparent background, which is referred to as RGB + Alpha 16 bit ".MOV" file. This enables the black background to actually be transparent. For video compositing or layering videos on top of each other, the ability to export videos with a transparent background allows for key stacking images and other interesting creative ideas. An example would be a blue particle field with a transparent (or alpha channel) background that is layered on top of a person in a video to look like they have a ball of energy or magic dust surrounding them. A similar effect can be created live with software like Notch, Disguise (formerly D3) and other expensive media servers with camera capture and image tracking. AfterEffects combined with Trapcode Suite effects animation can be used for many applications including event production, such as infographic presentation content, commercial text images, video production design at concerts and video mapping projects.

Extensive Educational Resources

...I quickly developed a much deeper understanding of AfterEffects by experimenting with various Trapcode techniques...

The resources are endless when it comes to self-education on the internet, but the educational videos that the Red Giant team has created in their YouTube series is enough to turn a high-school graphic design hobbyist into a professional FX animator. The videos provide an unreal amount of quick skill acquisition and in a few hours of studying Trapcode tutorials for Form, Particular and Mir I was exporting visual experiments. Throughout the process I not only learn numerous techniques to manipulate parameters with key-frames, I quickly developed up a much deeper understanding of AfterEffects by experimenting with various Trapcode techniques such as utilizing expressions and pick-whip to connect various parameters, for instance, to create an audio reactive visual effect with the Trapcode effect plugin Sound Keys. Below is another awesome tutorial about how to using Sound Keys, which is great for music videos, podcasts and graphic effects that want to create a visual for the sound. Something as simple as creating a sine wave representation of a person's voice during a podcast can create a visually compelling placeholder adding subtle movement to the brand logo, as opposed to a boring static image. You can find a full list of here Red Giant Official YouTube Trapcode Suite Tutorials. There are many other great applications in Trapcode Suite that all have their application. When combined they are a powerhouse of professional graphics effects for all levels of users.

What More Do You Want?

This brief overview of Trapcode Suite for AfterEffects barely scratches the surface of what is possible creatively. The power and ease of use are reasons that Trapcode has become an industry cornerstone for many visual effects professionals including Video CoPilot, which was what originally led me to discover the awesomeness that is Trapcode. Even though they have their own proprietary plugins as well, a lot of the principles learned in either tutorial that are skills which build on each other. Pretty soon you will be making realistic VFX like the one below for the closing credits of Star Trek Into Darkness by Video CoPilot.