News / PuppetRig

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!

Red9 ProPack: Preview Camera support

Yet more development for our Red9 ProPack workflows. This time a new preview camera system which has been added to help animators focus on their work more easily. This is a dynamic system, the camera auto focuses on your character and allows you to switch views via the RMB Dag menus, bound to the rig. Most importantly this doesn’t rely on you running our PuppetRig, it will run on any character as long as it’s wired to the basic system through the RigManager (and that takes 3 minutes max).

What’s really powerful is that this is integrated into our Exporter and Batch systems, allowing you to generate review playblasts using this camera setup, on mass. Imagine being able to generate previews of an entire days moCap session and actually have all of that data in camera shot!

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

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!