Red9 ProPack: WristLocks – fast hand Interaction

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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!

Latest Project: Fast & Furious Crossroads

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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

Latest Project: Amazon’s Crucible

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Delighted to finally be able to announce our involvement in Amazon’s new free-to-play action shooter “Crucible” released last month.

Red9’s been involved in the project from the very beginning, providing some of the key tools used for character development. Initially we were tasked to supply rigging solutions but that quickly grew into custom toolsets to support the animators. This project really help us push ProPack’s functionality and flexibility and we look forward to our continued relationship.

Really excited to see where this game goes.

Red9 : TalkBack LipSync service

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Delighted to be able to release this new demo of our Red9 TalkBack Facial Lip-Syncing service, taking raw audio data and mapping it to accurate facial motion. This has been in development for over 5 years now and with each new project we pass through the systems, the articulation and calibrations get better and better.

This demo is running on one of our Red9 Facial Rigs in Maya and the results are raw data, straight out of the solver with no animator input at all. The only input is the audio file itself. Being an offline process we can do a lot more tricks on the data than some of the current engine based real-time solutions 😉

TalkBack now runs on any rig, with training, and is a service we offer to all clients. Perfect if your budget won’t stretch to full performance capture! The system also works just as well with cartoon based rigs.

Red9 ProPack: Animation Re-Targeter (Pro_to_BND)

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The Animation Re-Targeter (Pro_to_BND ) is a huge part of the Red9 ProPack pipelines and workflows. Designed over the last 5 years to offer clients the ability to remap, on mass, any animation library to a fresh rig and bounce that data over to various formats.

Major update in the capability of the binder systems within Red9 ProPack!

If you’re working with us all our Red9 PuppetRigs come with the base BND binder file, if not you can still create these manually within the toolsets, although many of the complex options are only available directly to the Red9 PuppetRig.

We go through the various options within the remapper itself, both HIK based and pure skeleton based. These allow you to control how the fbx data is applied to the binder skeleton. If your FBXs don’t have a HIK definition don’t worry, there’s a tool for that also.

We also go through the various output formats, r9Anim, Maya File or custom Playblast. The Playblaster also exposes custom camera tracking, allowing mass drops of FBX animations to be quickly converted to movies, with tracked cameras for easy review, the camera focusing in on the renderMesh wires within the MetaRig..

We also showcase some of the new extreme mapping added to the systems, including the new Spine re-fit solver, giving far more consistent data, perfect if you’re moving data between MoBu and Maya consistently. This is the absolute backbone of a modern pipeline, giving you the ability to simply reuse animation data from any source in your project.

Please contact us for more details or for a demo build of ProPack

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..