Homefront: The Revolution

/0 Comments/in , /by

Info: Work was done whilst working for Dambuster Studios.

Proud to have been part of this epic game development, Homefront The Revolution, a project that started as Crytek and ended up as a DeepSilver title after the studio was bought out. These cutscenes are the result of nearly 3 years hard graft, researching and designing new pipelines for facial systems and CryEngine. As Technical Lead Mark created both the systems for the cutscenes and all the lipsyncing / secondary systems for the persistent universe, a task that would involve automating the batching of over 20,000 lines of dialog in 6 languages on a nightly basis as new audio was submitted to Perforce.  This was a huge task but a great one to have been involved in. Some excellent work by the cutscene crew on these sequences!!

 

Toyota Vellfire Commercial

/0 Comments/in , /by

Client : AltVfx Australia
Project : Toyota Vellfire Commercials

This was one of the first outings of our Red9 Facial Rigging setup, working closely with AltVfx in Australia we created 2 fully articulated facial rigs for the Gorilla’s used in 5 Japanese TV commercials for the Toyota Vellfire.

Red9 Production – First outing of our new rigging systems

/0 Comments/in , /by

Client : Baraboomstudios
Project : Dinosaurus Huevos

Over the last 6 months Red9 Consultancy has been gearing up and in the process getting some really nice gigs. These are the first TV commercial to use our new modular rigging systems, lots of squash, stretch and full quadruped rigging to produce a group of dinosaurs for 3 sequences. This was in conjunction with Baraboomstudios in LA and was a really great project to be involved with.

 

Develop Conference – MetaData Coding in a Maya Production Pipeline

/0 Comments/in , /by

Develop Conference Talk

In 2014 I did a talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton going through how we integrated the Red9 MetaData API into our production pipelines at Crytek.

The talk went through the benefits of integrating MetaData concepts in a Maya production pipeline. Red9 Metadata is Python API, part of the Red9 StudioTools, an open source toolkit freely available on the Autodesk Exchange website.

In the talk I showed how we integrated this concept to all aspects of the Crytek Maya animation pipeline. Meta is used in our animation rigs as a separate schema / network to manage data, binding tools to the systems via a generic layer. It’s used in our facial systems to manage relationships in code, breaking a complex system into manageable and logical chunks. We also use meta as the entry point for our exporter, the idea of connecting characters to export nodes which in turn connect to time and settings nodes.

Topics:

  • The background, why?
  • The basics of the MetaData Api base class, what does it do and what benefits does it give us.
  • Basics of metaData internal attribute handling and auto-complete.
  • Factory class aspects, the core of the systems, walking nodes as classes.
  • Using Maya nodes as class representations to structure your code.
  • Class inheritance and attribute binding.
  • Practical examples in production.
  • Generic nature of metadata, how it lends itself to tool pipelines.
  • Subclassing, how’s it’s been heavily subclassed and expanded by the Morpheus2 project.

The videos below were recorded purely as guide videos for the presentation but I thought I’d post them here as they’re a really useful reference for anybody looking at delving into MetaData!
Power Point Slides