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
Red9 ProPack : Animation Re-Director Update
/0 Comments/in Anim Re-Director, Red9 ProPack, Tools /by gingerWe wanted to share this huge update to the Animation Re-Direction system in the Red9 ProPack. This new setup has been driven largely by the needs of one of our clients dealing with mass MoCap and needing to straighten out data shot in a tight volume, a really tough thing to do without a tool like this.
The new setup not only keeps all the power of the previous setups, allowing us to direct animations via curves, shaping animations, but also now un-wrap animation data.
As usual if anybody has any questions or is interested in talking about this or our ProPack pipeline drop us an email!
Delta Airlines – Safety Video Game
/0 Comments/in Portfolio, Work /by gingerClient : Mi, Manchester
Project : Delta Safety Video Game
The project was for the latest in-flight video from Delta Airlines which is due to go onto all of their planes very shortly, the project also includes a HTML5 game! We were approached by MI in Manchester to do 6 facial rigs from scan data, 2 main hero rigs, the flight attendant and captain, plus 4 secondary rigs for the Chelsea footballers in the sequence. The flight attendant and the captain were scanned in LA, whilst we directed the facial scan sessions in London for the Chelsea players.
From the scan data we provided the facial models and the performance rig setup under huge time constraints but it was a blast!
Thanks to Mi and to Delta for their support!
Read More Here..
Red9 Pro : Animation Format Part2 : TIMECODE:
/0 Comments/in Anim Format, Red9 ProPack, Tools /by gingerThis one is a huge deal for anybody doing performance capture and managing cutscenes. We embed timecode into the Maya rig allowing us to reload and re-build scenes from multiple r9Anim files by referencing a timecode pointer. This will even allow us to sync animation data based on the internal timecode of a piece of audio.
Red9 Pro : Animation Format Part 1
/0 Comments/in Anim Format, Red9 ProPack, Tools /by gingerWe’ve spent a huge amount of time in developing a new animation format that does what ATOM should have done in the first place and that is to make animation data easily transferable between rigs, flexible and powerful enough to integrate into other systems.
Red9 Pro : Animation Re-Director
/0 Comments/in Anim Re-Director, Red9 ProPack, Tools /by gingerWe did this first video a little while ago but never added it to the blog. The re-director is a lossless animation re-direction setup allowing you to dynamically re-path animation data in Maya. This make NO connections ot your rig at all, it’s all done by caching the anim data and re-applying it rather than making any constraints etc.
Red9 ProPack – Animation Systems updates now available to Clients
/0 Comments/in Tools /by gingerIt’s been a while since we posted on the blog and we thought it about time we did a few new updates to show what’s now available in the Red9 ProPack to Clients taking Red9 Support.
Firstly don’t worry, StudioPack continues to get a lot of back-end updates and if you go grab latest from GitHub you’ll see we’ve recently added all the ProPack codebase to the API docs so you can see just how much we’ve extended the pipelines for Pro.
Read more →
Homefront: The Revolution
/0 Comments/in Portfolio, Work /by gingerInfo: 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 Portfolio, Work /by gingerClient : 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 Portfolio, Work /by gingerClient : 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 MetaData API, Red9 StudioPack /by gingerDevelop 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 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