animation

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!