DISCOVER RED GIANT GEO'S HANDY TOOLS

Heather Sterland introduces one of the newest additions to Maxon's suite of Red Giant VFX plugins with an atmospheric lunar creation

- Heather Sterland

April this year saw Maxon release a new Red Giant tool with Geo. It’s partly for artists who want to render 3D files in After Effects while skipping the step of rendering an object as a sequence of stills with alpha channels in rendering software, then adding these into their motion graphics software.

But there’s another aspect to Geo too: it performs the playback and rendering of thousands of objects, at speed, and is well worth considering if you need to create a potentially dangerous and expensive scene like a rockfall or underwater setting.

In this tutorial, we'll be creating the Moon using Geo, with a little help from a UV map from NASA, and adding a rain shower in the foreground using Geo's Clone tool. In the first four steps we'll make the rotating Moon, followed by creating the rainfall. For me, Geo's best selling point is its Clone tool, which can clone a 3D object thousands of times, handle it well and render it fast, as we'll see with the raindrops; but they could easily be snow or rocks too.

One tool that won't be covered is the Shadow Catcher, which is well worth exploring once you're familiar with Geo. If you're using a Red Giant trial, take the time to add native After Effects effects such as camera lens blur or lens flare to the scene, or test out the Bokeh Transition added to Red Giant Universe and Real Lens Flares in the Red Giant VFX set. This includes Obscuration layer ability so a flare can be calculated by reacting to obscuring shapes you place in front of the light.

01 IMPORT A SPHERE ACROSS FROM GEO

Open a new composition in After Effects at either 1,920 x 1,080 or 3,048 x 2,040 as you prefer. Create a new solid, go to the Effects panel and select ‘RG Trapcode’, then Geo. Open up the Geometry, select your sphere, and resize it to suit your needs.

02 GRAB THE MOON MAPS