Tech Reviews

Red Giant Universe 3.0, Foundry’s Mari 4.5 and Russian3DScanner’s ZWrap.

Red Giant Universe 3.0

Iknow I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m kind of a fan of Red Giant for my AfterEffects and Premiere needs. The Grading, Motion Design, Trapcode Particular and Form are standouts. So I was excited to learn that they recently pushed out a new version 3.0 of their Universe suite.

Universe is a library of effects and transitions geared toward mo-graph peeps as well as editors who need to throw in some placeholders — or if they have designer blood in them, the tools are right in Premiere (or Final Cut/Avid/Resolve/etc.) — for them to go hogwild and create finished looks right in the edit.

And Universe runs on the GPU for zippy response time, especially if you have a beefy video card.

Universe 3.0 doesn’t add a ton of whizbang, but when you already have close to a hundred effects, how much more do you need? I suspect the answer is that there is no limit to necessary whiz-bang, but bear with me.

In the After Effects/Premiere flavor, Universe is now available in the form of a dockable Dashboard that lives as a new tab. So, Universe lives inside the ecosystem, allowing you to browse through thumbnails of effects to quickly audition different looks. This is more of a workflow/UX update than a flashy thing, but when you don’t have to leave the comfort of the host UI, is does speed up the workflow and reduces breaks in the creative flow.

The new tools in 3.0 are all text-centric — specifically speeding up what would previously be time-consuming setups. “Screen Text,” “Text Tile” and “Type On” are great for onscreen data for window burns of which we vfx professionals do a ton. Things like scrolling data or bleeping and blooping words on computer monitors are a mainstay — and it’s deceivingly difficult to get them right.

“Hacker Text” kind of falls into the above category, but specifically, it provides scrambly glitch transitions from one text to another — as if a hacker is decrypting complex security codes. You can’t beat it for dramatic effect..

“Type Cast” lives outside of its new text cousins, mainly because it’s not for a specific “look.” Rather, it is designed to create elegant text animations. Normally, good mo-graph animation has cool ease-ins and outs of keyframes, overlapping motion, etc. — as opposed to amateur go-to-point-A, keyframe, go-topoint-B, keyframe. The Type Cast tool uses slider parameters to adjust these nuances, finessing text reveals or animations into place. And with GPU acceleration, the results can be immediate.

The subscription rate for Universe has increased quite a bit from previous iterations, so you may end up with sticker shock for a plugin that you may have used to get a glitchy VHS look in the past. However, if you do a lot of font-based graphics or burn-in text to a lot of monitors, the time you save is going to be worth it. Just build in a couple more hours into

your bid to cover the cost of the license for the year! Website: www.redgiant.com Price: $30 (per month); $199 (per year)

Foundry’s Mari 4.5

Foundry’s Mari has been the go-to texture painting program for the larger studios for quite a while now. But with Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer/Painter elbowing its way onto the stage, Mari 4.5 has upped the ante by expanding from a predominantly texture-based tool to something even more robust with Material creation and support. Which really does transform the way an artist will use Mari.

The Material System provides a way to develop and prototype looks within a target shader system. You can choose your target render engine from Unreal to Principled BRDF (both in various flavors for vfx or games) to V-Ray and, most recently, Autodesk’s Arnold Renderer. Since materials are specific to the renderer you’ll be using, it’s important to see how they look within that renderer — and not having to leave Mari or send it through multiple departments to see a result is critical to productivity. The sliders and parameters conform to the shader system, so there is a oneto-one correlation between Mari and Katana/ Maya/Houdini/etc. Furthermore, the result is shown within the viewport, so changes are immediate and accurate.

The Materials live in their own shelf, with a selection of default materials from Foundry. This library can be filled with your own materials, which can be shared with other artists. And, through the Material Ingestion Tool, you can bring in materials from various online third party and community sources such as Megascans, Textures.com, Substance, Texture Haven, and others. Upon ingestion, you can adjust naming conventions and wild cards to help automatically build the material based on the map names. As an example, sometimes your diffuse color is called “diffuse” or maybe “albedo” or even “color.”

The Materials are optimized from a UX standpoint to work in a layer-type methodology, but obviously you can work within Mari’s node system as well. The layers allow for stacking of materials, which can be revealed