News / Red9 ProPack

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.

Red9 ProPack Exporter

Delighted to announce a new 3 part series of demos covering all aspects of our Red9 ProPack Exporter System. This hugely in-depth toolset covers all aspect of a modern export pipeline, from full FBX support, custom Playblast handling, our own r9Anim format, ABC alembic outputs to Perforce integration.

01: First we cover the base UI’s and concepts like path management, UI functionality, the node structures themselves, audio connection support and time offset / timecode support as well as some of the more in-depth features of the setups.

02: In this demo we cover the FBX export setups as well as showing you how to wire your own rig to the setup and what’s required. FBX we cover both our custom BindPose Exporter and the Animation Exporter. Topics include the SceneRoot Management, HIK Casting, Additive Anim Exports, Root Motion Compensation & Blendshape Export Management.

03: Final demo in the series covering the Red9 ProPack Exporter, this time we go through the Playblast task and the settings available. These include custom handling of the visibilities & render states of objects as well as custom camera tracking to ensure the camera remains focused in on the characters motions, regardless of the motion.

Red9 ProPack: WristLocks – Fast Hand Interaction

Red9 ProPack and Red9 PuppetRig now work together to bring you our animation friendly “WristLock” system. This is a new way for animators to interactive with, and manipulate objects in your characters hands. No more messing with locators, separate constraints, tedious tracking and blending, it’s all done inside the rig with the UI support to allow for really fast switching and binding.

In this demo we go through just how fast it can be to extract and bind a characters wrists up to a gun, manipulate it then bounce that animation between the gun and back to the wrists, setting up a MoCap scene with a full double handed weapon in a matter of minutes.

Best of all this new system is fully supported by all of the other tools within ProPack, including our parent space switching systems, so bouncing these wrist lock ctrls around the rig is an absolute breeze.

Don’t forget to follow us on YouTube to keep up with all of the new features and demos!