News / Facial

Knuckles : Paramount+

April 27, 2024

We’re excited to finally be able to show everybody what we’ve been working on for the last year. Knuckles is a 6 part series that follows Knuckles (Idris Elba) on a hilarious journey of self-discovery, now available to stream on Paramount+

Knuckles : Character Rigging

Red9 were delighted to be brought onto the project early in pre-production to take on all of the rigging requirements, both body and facial. Knuckle’s and his friends, Sonic and Tails, are particularly expressive characters and as you can imagine it’s taken some intense development and discovery to be able to push the characters to the extremes required, but hopefully the results speak for themselves.

The benefit of bringing Red9 to the production is simple, we provided a set of master character rigs that Paramount were then able to distribute to all VFX vendors involved in the project. Usually each vendor would take care of their own rigging requirements so we’re not only removing the duplication of work, but also maintaining the characters identity and abilities across all shots.

Our Red9 ProPack pipeline toolset was also a big part of the project, not only did the VFX vendors all use our animation rigs in Maya, but they also benefited from consistent pipeline tools to maintain and expand the rigs abilities.

Autodesk Maya has been pushed incredibly hard on this show and all without the need for custom proprietary plugins. What the animators saw whilst animating is the actual on screen mesh. The final high res hero rigs we had running in Maya in real-time thanks to a complex layered stack of deformers.

It’s been an absolute blast and we have to extend huge thanks to Paramount and particularly Ged Wright and the in-house VFX team for their confidence in taking us along for the journey, it’s been an absolute blast!

Red9 : TalkBack LipSync service

March 11, 2020

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 : Dynamic Timecode management within Maya for Cloud Imperium Games

October 11, 2018

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.