Star Trek: Dark Remnant VR Project

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Delighted to be able to share our latest production work for Star Trek : Dark Remnant a VR experience for Dave & Busters. The VR experience will be rolling out across 122 Dave & Buster locations and from what we’ve seen looks like a hell of a ride!

This was a fast turn around project working alongside our client Strange Reptile to produce all the character rigging and facial setups, 11 characters in total.

The project also used our proprietary LipSyncing service “TalkBack” for all of the base facial in the project, ideal for projects like this with several hundred seconds of facial to produce in a limited time. TalkBack produces facial articulation purely from audio data, with differing levels of calibration and data is generally delivered in our r9Anim format, making it far faster and easier for clients to load up on the rigs than having to handle Maya files directly.

 

Read more about the project here:  Upload VR News

Red9 ProPack: Unreal ART Rig Integrations

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Red9 ProPack: RigManager – Unreal ART Rig support

Delighted to be able to go through the new integrated hooks we’ve added to Red9 ProPack to natively support the Unreal ART Rig. This arose out of a conversation with Jeremy Ernst and Brad Clark wanting animation mirroring working on the Art Rig, but quickly turned into a new wiring setup for ProPack that we’ll be expanding to other Rig systems out there soon.

This massively expands on the abilities of the Unreal Animation Tool Kit (ART) Rig by exposing all of the ProPack goodness in a single click, wiring the rig fully to the MetaData subsystems. In this demo we quickly go through the integration to some of our core tools including :

  • Animation ReDirector, perfect for simple aimposes as well as cutscenes alike.
  • Animation format handling (r9anim) our integrated animation format, fast and very flexible, allowing loading of data in relative world space!
  • Custom RMB DAG menu exposure for fast access to core Red9 functions
  • ProPack Exporter, our own export handling and management system based on the MetaData backends, fully batchable and expandable.
  • P4 integrations, if running Perforce all of our core systems have integrated Perforce hooks.
  • Pose Handling, full pose library management
  • Animation Mirroring, yes, a simple click to mirror your poses or animations.

For more details please contact us directly for pricing or to arrange a demo of the ProPack.

Red9 ProPack : Animation Re-Director’s Now Interactive!!

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Animation Re-Director, now with Interactive Live Mode!

We also demo the ultimate goal, Quadruped re-direction

This is a quick demo that goes through the new “MakeLive” interactive mode within the Animation Re-Director tool of ProPack. This is a massive workflow improvement, making the system interactive, allowing things like a simple walk cycle to be turned into a full cinematic sequence, seamlessly handled live in the scene!

The end goal is to allow this system to work fully with Quadrupeds and there’s a WIP file demo of our horse data being handled live, but this is test data only! Note that through the RigManager in ProPack this functionality can be exposed to any character rig!

If you think this could benefit your production don’t forget to get in touch.

Red9 ProPack : Dynamic Timecode management within Maya for Cloud Imperium Games

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Complex Production Timecode Tamed!

Ever wondered how a massive production like Cloud Imperium Game’s Squadron 42 deals with the physical amount of performance capture data. How do you manage the sync of separate animation and audio files over multiple shoots, syncing data of headcam footage with audio trimmed and edited into smaller game clips? This demo goes through live assets from CIG and demonstrates the new Dynamic timecode support within the ProPack itself. This is a massive integration of all of our timecode management and syncing systems, expanding on our previous work to produce a very flexible new way of working. This is very relevant to anybody dealing with mass facial performance data.

CIG wanted to track facial performance capture, on-mass, from a master video edit and EDL, cut offline from all the Headcam footage from an entire days performance shoot. The issue was that they then ended up with a single headcam video sequence, containing multiple non-consistent timecodes, yet still needed to be able to sync all the edited audio clips back to the data tracked from this single video.

The tools allowed them to do just that in a simple workflow that not only auto-synced the audio back to the data, but also setup all the export ranges, names and events as well as creating individual r9Anim files of each clip, allowing them to be later loaded back against the body data. Note that the export ranges in the demo were actually extracted directly from the original offline EDL file itself.

 

Massive thanks to Cloud Imperium Games for letting us show this internal demo.

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!

Red9 PuppetRig – Auto Solvers and Trackers, resolving complex data

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This is a very quick demo to show just how far the solvers inside the Red9 PuppetRig can be pushed with some insane MoCap data. PuppetRig includes auto-solvers for pole-vector tracking, auto-clavicle solving as well as softIK systems and this video shows just how well they deal with even the most complex data.

As you’d expect all these solvers run not only on BiPed data but also on our Quadruoped leg systems and are fully blendable as we’re more than aware that animators often want complete control, however as a solution within the rigging system they make hand key extremely fast. Best thing is that all the solvers can be quickly baked back to simple translate data on their respective controllers.

For more info feel free to contact us..

Red9 ProPack : Project and Perforce Handlers

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In this demo we go through our new Project Handlers, expose newly upgraded Perforce Integration and go through our r9File class object for all TDs out there wanting an easy life.

This is a hugely important concept for anybody running ProPack, especially within a large studio environment, if you’ve got a demo build of ProPack please ensure you watch at least the first 5 minutes of this video as its a CRUCIAL concept within the pipeline!

The Project Handlers manage all aspects of our systems, anything that requires a variable, a path, a class binding or a settings file they all inspect this system, allowing dependencies to be dynamically changed by simply switching the project mount.

More importantly the system now has deep Perforce integration, managing both server and workspace connection per project. Perforce is also exposed within the Red9 Browser, allowing you to seamlessly browser through your full P4 repository directly within Maya with options to checkout, revert, sync, add etc ..

Finally we go through the r9File handler, a high level file object that binds all of the project systems together, exposing both P4 handling and base OS management in a really simple python object for all TDs to use.

Please connect us for more details

Red9 ProPack: Massive updates to our IKFK handlers

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This is a huge update to the way that our Red9 ProPack deals with IKFK matching in rig systems. Big new features including :

  • Spine FK-IK matching via a new iterative algorithm which produces a really close match. This is a huge deal for animators going between MotionBuilder and Maya as we can now resolve the spine data far more accurately.
  • Limb System matching including new toe rotate resolving. This enables twist added to the FK to be by-passed and also all random FK toe data to be pushed directly back to the ik solutions.
  • AutoClav resolving and matching for the Red9 PuppetRig, allowing us to finally fully match the arm systems regardless of the state of the Auto-Clav solvers
  • New ParentSpace matching added to the toolsets so we can switch the world space of any of the ik control systems over time with compensation.

Red9 ProPack – Health Manager API

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The Health Manager concept is a massive part of the Red9 ProPack Pipeline, designed to allow TD’s to sanity check files in a neat, clear API with full UI support. Write your own simple compounds either using our default tests or write your own from the ground up and use those to validate your files before pushing them out to production.

I can’t stress enough just how much this has saved our lives over the last few years, allowing us to ensure all our assets are solid before we send them out to clients. This demo first goes through the initial concepts and UI, then we cover some of the more complex tests. Finally we go through how to write your own tests and Validation classes.

Note: if you’re running blendshapes and having fbx index issues watch on!!

 

Please contact us for more information or for a test drive of ProPack!

Red9 ProPack : SkinTools

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The Red9 ProPack SkinTools are designed to manage skinning data and allow users to quickly save, load and debug skin data for their characters. This also allows you to remap joints, quickly moving skinWeight info between joints in the cluster.  In production we tend to pass r9Skn files around routinely when iterating on characters and it’s now a crucial part of our internal workflows so it made sense to expose it to ProPack users!