News / Red9 ProPack

Red9 ProPack : Animation Re-Director’s Now Interactive!!

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

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

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!