Red9 Sound and Audio handler updates

Finally got round to doing a quick demo of the new AudioNode handler in the Red9 StudioPack. This one shows how you can use the 'compile' function in the sound menu to pre-compile multiple sound nodes in Maya so that you get a complete soundtrack to any playblasts. Anybody who's ever tried animating to multiple sound nodes in Maya, particularly when animating dialog will know how frustrating it is when you then try and playbladt that scene, and only get 1 sound track included!!

I also go through the new inspect code, capable of extracting metaData info from wav files including full support for Broadcast wav's. This is really useful to gain access to thiongs like internal timecode data. There's also extensions capable of extracting metaData from any media format, Mov, avi etc but for that you have to download ffmeg which I use in the inspect call.

I'm really keen to hear from those running MacOs or Linux, does the compiler work for you?

thanks (don't forget the donate button...cough...)

Mark

Red9 goes all GIT!

Well this has been asked for by many of you for a while so I'm finally sorting it out, pushing Red9 repository up onto GitHub. I've always used a private SVN server but this should give people more exposure to the changes happening on a daily basis.

 https://github.com/markj3d/Red9_StudioPack

Still getting by head round GIT so bear with me

Mark

New Pose Saver tools and features

Well it's been a while since I did a demo so here's one that goes through the upgrades to the poseSaver in v1.41.

New PoseBlending: Pose Blending is a new feature that allows you to mix in a percentage of any pose to the current state of your controllers. When you RMB>PoseBlend you get a new slider UI that controls the mix. Note that when this slider is launched the current state of the rig is CACHED against it's current state so please be aware of that. I had to do this to get the slider to react fast enough to make it worth doing.

New MaintainParents: Another big update to the poseLoader. This one allows the pose code to 'hold' or maintain a given set of attributes during pose load. This not only returns the given attrs back to their current state prior to loading the pose, but it also recalculates the pose at the same time. This means that even if a pose is stored with all the controllers in one parent space and your current controller is in a different space, the original stored pose will still be reached, but it'll be recalculated in the current space ;)

This relies on the 'relative space' flag and is only available in this mode as I use this mechanism to do the psace compensation.

Any comments, suggestions or bugs let me know

Mark

Broadcast Wav support

New Sound file inspector:

Anybody who's dealt with moCap sessions where you're recording audio will have probably run into the broadcast wav format, an extension of the standard wav but containing a whole extra chunk of metaData specifically aimed at syncing data around studio's. The key is that it includes an internal timecode for the wav, usually pumped into it from the studio's timecode generator so that video, audio and moCap all has the same reference and can be kept in sync.

In order to use this at work, and because we use the Red9_AudioNode as a basis for all Maya audio functions, I've added in full BWav support to the Red9.AudioNode this is both at a simple inspect level (Wav Inspector - launched from the Red9_Sound menu in the Trax Editor seen below) and full support from the code side, so you can cast any sound node to a Red9_AudioNode and just run the .bwav_getHeader(). This builds up an internal dict with all the header data bound to it.

If the wav isn't a Bwav then you still get the main header data, it just omits the BroadcastWav block from the UI.

This has been an absolute pain in the arse to extract as I've had to get deep into binary chunks to fine where in the file stream the Bwav header data block exists!

Anyway, this will be in the next release, unless you want to give it a whirl in which case drop me a mail

cheers

Mark