News / News

Dead Island 2: Latest Project

Congratulations to all our friends at Dambuster Studios for some epic work on Dead Island 2. I’m sure you are all aware that the official trailer’s were revealed at Gamescom this week and look fabulous.

Red9 were brought in on a consultancy basis a few years back to help setup the facial rig systems for the lead characters so it’s lovely to see the work finally in the public domain. Looking forward to getting our hands on a copy next year.

Red9 ProPack : Update May2022

This is a huge release for the Red9 ProPack, focusing on speed and data integrity, two key points to any modern pipeline.

r9Anim our custom animation format now fully supports the saving and loading of data to and from animLayers, as well as getting a significant speed boost. The new build includes a frame sampler to deal with constrained data. This also gives faster merging of animLayers under the hood on save, something that was an issue in previous versions.

Our SkinSaver system has also been rewritten from the ground up giving a 10 fold speed increase in the loading of complex data. We’ve also added more features and debugging.

On top of these base formats we’ve added functionality to some of the PuppetRig toolsets including our hand interaction system “wrist locks” and changes to the IKFK solving systems.

Finally if you’re needing to remap MoCap data via HIK then we’ve just made that process far easier, allowing the likes of XSENS data to be remapped in 1 go.

r9Anim format updates, focusing on animLayer support and speed
IKFK Casting, match to the final cached solution data
Sometimes the simple ones are the best, copy paste transforms between Maya sessions. We also cover the Red9 HUD setups
WristLocks update, promoting props for better integration to the rest of the toolsets
PRO_TO_BND updates to better support HIK auto-loading of definitions and TPose data. Perfect for the likes of XSENS

Red9 ProPack is gaining more and more traction amongst a wide variety of studios. Sometimes it’s easier, faster and more reliable to integrate a pre-existing solution into workflows than it is to start from the beginning, re-inventing a wheel that we’ve been finessing for the last 10years.

Red9 ProPack is available on subscription in the ProPack tab.

Latest Project: Fast & Furious Crossroads

Delighted to announce Red9’s involvement in Fast & Furious – Crossroads, developed by SlightlyMad Studios. We were involved from the very early stages of the project supplying Body & Facial Rigging as well as LipSyncing services for the entire project.

This is the first title where all of the facial animation was generated for the project using our TalkBack LipSync service. The final game has some 2hrs of facial data in total, with minimal animation adjustments over the top of the raw solve to add further expression and eyeline fixes. This was a really key project for the development of TalkBack, with so much data to process we were continually pushing the results hard and catching logic issues. From raw audio files we supplied tracked r9Anim data, our lightweight animation format for Maya, which the client loaded directly over the body data.

We also provided Red9 PuppetRigs for all of the body animation, although didn’t get involved in the deformation side for the body. For the facial setups one of the biggest challenges with the project was the number of iterations required on the key cast characters as likenesses were nailed down. We ended up developing new tools in our systems to allow us to consume changes in the base client meshes without destroying all of the facial setup and sculpt work that had already been done.

All in all this was a challenging project but great to see if finally out there