Bridging the gap, wiring any rigs directly to the Red9 Puppet back-end

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This is the final missing link from ProPack, a system to enable you to bind ANY rig, both BODY and FACIAL, to our Red9 ProMetaData systems. This shows you how easy it is to marker up your rig to behave as a native PuppetRig as far as the tools are concerned, exposing the full power of the ProPack to your productions. We’d obviously like everybody to use our Red9 PuppetRig but have to be realistic, so this new UI bridges the gap.

We’ve exposed 2 new nodes designed to mimic the native Red9 Puppet setup and our Facial system, but these have been expanded to be a little more flexible. By simply wiring your rig to these nodes the rest of ProPack will assume it’s running a correctly formatted rig, exposing the full power of the pipeline without any of the work. The wiring is a simple abstract layer that all the tools communicate through, all backed up by our powerful MetaData API.

If you’re running full performance capture then this also exposes all the hooks to our timecode syncing and management systems!

Develop Conference – MetaData Coding in a Maya Production Pipeline

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Develop Conference Talk

In 2014 I did a talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton going through how we integrated the Red9 MetaData API into our production pipelines at Crytek.

The talk went through the benefits of integrating MetaData concepts in a Maya production pipeline. Red9 Metadata is Python API, part of the Red9 StudioTools, an open source toolkit freely available on the Autodesk Exchange website.

In the talk I showed how we integrated this concept to all aspects of the Crytek Maya animation pipeline. Meta is used in our animation rigs as a separate schema / network to manage data, binding tools to the systems via a generic layer. It’s used in our facial systems to manage relationships in code, breaking a complex system into manageable and logical chunks. We also use meta as the entry point for our exporter, the idea of connecting characters to export nodes which in turn connect to time and settings nodes.

Topics:

  • The background, why?
  • The basics of the MetaData Api base class, what does it do and what benefits does it give us.
  • Basics of metaData internal attribute handling and auto-complete.
  • Factory class aspects, the core of the systems, walking nodes as classes.
  • Using Maya nodes as class representations to structure your code.
  • Class inheritance and attribute binding.
  • Practical examples in production.
  • Generic nature of metadata, how it lends itself to tool pipelines.
  • Subclassing, how’s it’s been heavily subclassed and expanded by the Morpheus2 project.

The videos below were recorded purely as guide videos for the presentation but I thought I’d post them here as they’re a really useful reference for anybody looking at delving into MetaData!
Power Point Slides