News

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