Red9 ProPack continues to grow from strength to strength

With GDC in full swing we thought it a good time to go through some of the recent features of our Red9 ProPack pipeline. ProPack is available in both nodelocked and floating studio license, supporting multiple projects with full Perforce backend support.

ProPack continues to grow from strength to strength, we've been working really hard with some key clients recently on some major new features and we're hearing from more and more studios looking for solid solutions for their animation needs. We can generally take a client from having no rig or pipeline to fully setup within a matter of weeks and that also includes facial rigs and data!




ART Rig Support:
Firstly the latest build of ProPack includes full integration for the Unreal ART Rig, allowing you to hook ProPack systems directly to the rig as if it were a native Red9 Puppet. This is a big advantage to anybody wanting a complex workflow over and above the base systems of the Unreal Art Toolkit.

ART Rig - Read More




Animation ReDirector:
The Re-Director has always been a big part of the ProPack but in the latest builds this is now an interactive tool, allowing for instant feedback and re-pathing of your complex animation data. 

Animation ReDirector - Read More




Rig Manager: 
This bridges the gap between any external Maya rigs and our ProPack metadata systems, allowing for fast binding to the underlying node setups and exposing all the tools with a few clicks.  This is particularly powerful when bound to facial rigs as it also then exposes all of our imageplane and camera management specifically aimed at facial animators.

Rig Manager - Read More




Red9 PuppetRig: 
Our PuppetRig continues to develop along with the toolsets that manage it. This latest version includes a new iterative FK>IK spine fitting system, designed to resolve the issue of poorly fitting ik spline fit to fk data. The iterative fit works a little like a secondary ik solver, trying to best fit the systems.

Red9 PuppetRig updates - Read More




Dynamic Timecode: 
Finally we'd like to introduce you to our dynamic timecode systems, designed to allow for seamless syncing of data from performance capture to final sequence, managing body, facial and audio data inside Maya, none destructive and fully integrated into the entire ProPack pipeline. This system was built alongside CloudImperium games to help them handle their massive moCap needs..

Dynamic Timecode - Read More


More to come including our powerful custom exporter systems aimed at taming your outputs to engine!

For more information don't forget to contact us!!

Red9 ProPack: upgraded FK>IK matching systems and ParentSpace management added to ProPack

Delighted to be able to announce a massive upgrade in the way that we deal with FK>IK systems and ParentSpaces within the Red9 ProPack pipeline. Key to this is a new Spine matching algorithm that we've hooked up to the Red9 PuppetRig to give us a really solid match between FK and IK spine systems, something that always been very difficult to achieve.

Also added are upgrades to the Limb matching to deal with FK twist when switching over to IK, new toe rotate extraction and full management of our Auto-Clavicle setup withing the rig. This allows clients to animate with the solver on but always bake it back down to clean extracted rotate data.

 
 

On top of all of this we've added ParentSpace matching to the systems so now you really can mess with the world space of the rig and always push systems around to match over time.

All of the new features also include a new SmartBake setup such that data can be matched to current keys within the system rather than per frame baked data, perfect for clients hand-keying animation rather than moCap data.

As always check-out our other updates on the news feed of our website or on our Vimeo Channel

thanks

Mark

For those of you who don't follow the Red9 website news section I highly recommend you add it to your RSS feed. The 2 links below are new demos that go into much more detail than ever before about the whole Red9 ProPack and PuppetRig workflows.

Demo 1 : Red9 PuppetRig

This new series of videos are designed to give you a wider overview of the Red9 ProPack and what it’s like to work with us on a professional level to help streamline and speed-up your workflows.

This first video goes through our Red9 PuppetRig solution, the new DagMenu system and dynamic CharacterPicker. Crucially it also shows we use an abstract layer to communicate with all the tools and the API, meaning that none of our systems are tied directly to the rig solution itself.

Whilst we’d love everybody to use the Puppet Rig we’re more than aware that this is an impracticality for many studios who have invested time into their own rigging systems, this is a neat way to simply add a layer of MetaNodes to fool our systems into thinking they’re dealing with a native Puppet Rig.

Demo 2 : Red9 - Managing Animation Deliveries

In this second video in the series we show you just how easy it is to map animation data over to the Red9 Puppet Rig, on-mass, using the Red9 Browser and the “Pro:To_BND” functionality. This hopefully gives you some insight to the power of the Browser when used with the in-built Extensions Manager to add custom functionality, allowing TD’s to expose functions directly to the Animators.

We go through the AnimBinder setup itself, a file that accompanies all Red9 Puppet deliveries. This is ideal for layering fast modifications to any initial character remapping, something only exposed to clients running the Puppet. The Pro Binder setup also natively supports HIK under the hood, allowing you to remap data from any fbx source, including files from MotionBuilder.

Finally we show some of the tricks unique to ProPack to deal with that initial stage of animation clean-up, filtering and re-directing.

Lots of goodies in these rwo videos and more to come

thanks

Mark

Red9 Production - First outing of our new rigging systems

Over the last 6 months Red9 Consultancy has been gearing up and in the process getting some really nice gigs. This is the first TV commercial to use our new rigging systems, lots of squash, stretch and full quadruped rigging. Great project to be involved with and this is just one of a series for the client.

More production examples coming soon showing off our Facial rigging systems which has kept us very busy indeed!

cheers

Mark