Red9 TalkBack LipSyncing solutions for Facial

Red9 TalkBack is our audio driven lip-syncing service we offer to clients. Developed over the last 5 years this uses state of the art algorithms and articulation processing to realistically drive any facial rig, purely from an audio file. 

This is an off-line process, allowing us to achieve far better results that standard engine driven systems but at the expense of being a non real-time solution. Perfect for mid-range cutscenes or projects that can't run to the expense of full performance capture. 

Initially developed to help us test our own Red9 Facial Rigs, TalkBack has matured into a huge system that we're now offering clients. We've already run through a number of high end game projects (all awaiting release) as well as several VFX projects. The system is also flexible enough to also produce accurate results on cartoon data and the more we process, the better the learning algorithms get. 

For more information please contact us to see how we could help streamline your production! 

info@red9consultancy.com

Red9 ProPack: Animation ReMapping

It's been a while since I undated this Blog, mainly because this will get rolled into the Red9 Consultancy website shortly. However, I wanted to add this new post as this is a really big workflow feature that we've been working on for ProPack and one that other studios really should take a serious look all.

The Animation Re-Targetter (Pro_to_BND ) is a huge part of the Red9 ProPack pipelines and workflows. Designed over the last 5 years to offer clients the ability to remap, on mass, any animation library to a fresh rig and bounce that data over to various formats.

 If you're working with us all our Red9 PuppetRigs come with the base BND binder file, if not you can still create these manually within the toolsets. We go through some of the extreme mapping added to the systems, including the new Spine re-fit solver, giving far more consistent data, perfect if you're moving data between MoBu and Maya consistently.

This is the absolute backbone of a modern pipeline, giving you the ability to simply reuse animation data from any source in your project.

As always please drop me a line if you'd like to take the ProPack for a test drive!

info@red9consultancy.com

thanks

Mark

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: Project and Perforce Handling

Red9 Consultancy Link

In this demo we go through our new Project Handlers, expose newly upgraded Perforce Integration and go through our r9File class object for all TDs out there wanting an easy life.

 This is a hugely important concept for anybody running ProPack, especially within a large studio environment, if you’ve got a demo build of ProPack please ensure you watch at least the first 5 minutes of this video as its a CRUCIAL concept within the pipeline!

 The Project Handlers manage all aspects of our systems, anything that requires a variable, a path, a class binding or a settings file they all inspect this system, allowing dependencies to be dynamically changed by simply switching the project mount.

 More importantly the system now has deep Perforce integration, managing both server and workspace connection per project. Perforce is also exposed within the Red9 Browser, allowing you to seamlessly browser through your full P4 repository directly within Maya with options to checkout, revert, sync, add etc ..

 Finally we go through the r9File handler, a high level file object that binds all of the project systems together, exposing both P4 handling and base OS management in a really simple python object for all TDs to use.

Please connect us for more details

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

Red9 ProPack : HealthManager

The Red9 Health Manager concept is a massive part of the Red9 ProPack Pipeline, designed to allow TD’s to sanity check files in a neat, clear API with full UI support. Write your own simple compounds either using our default tests or write your own from the ground up and use those to validate your files before pushing them out to production.

I can’t stress enough just how much this has saved our lives over the last few years, allowing us to ensure all our assets are solid before we send them out to clients. This demo first goes through the initial concepts and UI, then we cover some of the more complex tests. Finally we go through how to write your own tests and Validation classes.

Note: if you’re running blendshapes and having fbx index issues watch on!!




As always, please checkout the Red9 website for more details, and don't forget to subscribe to the new YouTube channel!

thanks

Mark

New YouTube Channel!

Red9 is moving it's main demo videos and updates over to our new YouTube channel:


Red9 YouTube Channel


Vimeo has been great over the years but YouTube is just easier to manage in the long term. Lots of new updates on there and more to come.

Please also make sure that you checkout our main website for news and announcements

thanks

Mark