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: 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 ProPack – Butterworth Filter – Animation Re-Sampling on Steroids!

Read More Here

Coming Very Soon!!!

This is a huge new feature for any animators dealing with dense baked data. The Red9 StudioPack already has an interactive curve filter to deal with re-sampling animation curves but soon the ProPack will be getting an all new Butterworth algorithm, one of the main filter methods from MotionBuilder for cleaning up noisy data.

The Butterworth filter is actually derived from an audio filter so is superb at taking noise out and re-sampling animation data, we’ve taken this method and wrapped it into a neat, interactive tool inside Maya.

This will save anybody dealing with MoCap or facial data a massive amount of production time!!

Cheers, and don't forget to link to the "News" section of our new web-site for more updates on Red9

thanks

Mark

Red9 ProPack : Animation Re-Director Update

I wanted to share this huge update to the Animation Re-Direction system in the Red9 ProPack. This new setup has been driven largely by the needs of one of our clients dealing with mass MoCap and needing to straighten out data shot in a tight volume, a really tough thing to do without a tool like this.

The new setup not only keeps all the power of the previous setups, allowing us to direct animations via curves, shaping animations, but also now un-wrap animation data.



As usual if anybody has any questions or is interested in talking about this or our ProPack pipeline drop me a mail!

Many thanks

Mark

Red9 ProPack - Animation Systems updates now available to Clients

It's been a while since I posted on the blog and I thought it about time I did a few new updates to show what's now available in the Red9 ProPack to Clients taking Red9 Support.

Firstly don't worry, StudioPack continues to get a lot of back-end updates and if you go grab latest from GitHub you'll see we've recently added all the ProPack codebase to the API docs so you can see just how much we've extended the pipelines for Pro.

So where's all the development going... well as you'll see below we've been concentrating most of our efforts on the bigger picture, creating the kind of animation tools that keep us on top of the game, offering clients that extra edge and taking the stress out of a modern pipeline.




Red9 Pro : Animation Re-Director : 
I did this first video a little while ago but never added it to the blog. The re-director is a lossless animation re-direction setup allowing you to dynamically re-path animation data in Maya. This make NO connections ot your rig at all, it's all done by caching the anim data and re-applying it rather than making any constraints etc.





Red9 Pro : Animation Format Part1: 
We've spent a huge amount of time in developing a new animation format that does what ATOM should have done in the first place and that is to make animation data easily transferable between rigs, flexible and powerful enough to integrate into other systems.




Red9 Pro : Animation Format Part2 : TIMECODE: 
This one is a huge deal for anybody doing performance capture and managing cutscenes. We embed timecode into the Maya rig allowing us to reload and re-build scenes from multiple r9Anim files by referencing a timecode pointer. This will even allow us to sync animation data based on the internal timecode of a piece of audio.

Many thanks


Mark

Red9 ProPack - First Sneak Peak - Animation ReDirector

We'll we thought it was about time that we started to show you what we've been up to with the Red9 ProPack. This first demo is the Animation ReDirector, a powerful tool for doing just that, taking a current animation and non-destructively and dynamically re-directing the animation. Hope you like it, plenty more to come over the next few months as we gear up to release the new tools pack, we just need to work out the licensing options and the back-end of the code!

 cheers

 Mark

New AnimUI functions....

So a few updates. I've been working on the back-end to the AnimUI a fair bit recently and have exposed a few new options that should be useful to you all.

First one is the matchMethod - this is the code that takes 2 hierarchies and matches them, node for node to them process correctly. This is used by all the anim code calls, copyAttrs/Keys, poseLoad etc so it's a really low level feature. Now this has been there for a while but it wasn't actually hooked up correctly...ooops! There's been a flag to control the matchMethod but it was missing an option, and that in turn has caused a few of you issues.

The new option is 'index' and that turns OFF all the matching code and just takes the 2 hierarchies that the filter found, and zips them together in the order they were found. Why? well this is what Maya native does on all hierarchies, absolutely no intelligence just one to one mapping. It will now allow things like this to match:

AlphaRig_WristCtrl == BetaRig_WristCtrl

previously this would never match as there's no naming match there, other than me allowing you to enter a search and replace to the UI. With the index option it will match, as that node was found as the 4th child of the hierarchy in both rigs. This also means that the Pose's stored for Alpha_Rig will load correctly to Beta_Rig ;)

So what else, well I've added sort logic to the poseUI. You can do a number of new things in there. Firstly the searchBox takes comma separated searches, so you can add "walk,run,idle' and it will show those as a filter. You'll also notice there's 2 new icons, sort by name, and sort by date. This has been getting on my nerves as my facial library at work is 80+ shapes and if I add a new one I have a lot of scrolling to do!! So sort by date is a godsend.

These are in the GitHub branch and will shortly go into another live release, after testing ;)

cheers

Mark

Interactive FilterCurve update Vimeo

Just a quick update to the Interactive FilterCurve Tool in the StudioPack based on a ton of feedback from a good friend of mine running it in production, cheers Santi ;)

Resample has been added to the tool so that you can resample, interactively over time, effectively baking your data down interactively. The Filter now also has a clamp to frame option so you end with whole frames rather than subframes.

Thanks for all the support

Mark

New Interactive Curve Filter and Randomizer UI's

A Vimeo demo of 2 new anim UI's designed for anybody dealing with dense baked data such as MoCap or wanting to add some random noise into anim data.

 The InteractiveSimplifyUI is basically a smart wrapper over Maya's internal simply command, anybody who's ever used the default tool will know how basic and un-user friendly it is. This deals with that issue by giving you interactive key reduction. Unlike the default Maya implementation this also allows you to reduce just selected keys.

 The Randomizer is another anim curve manipulation function, designed to allow you to add controlled noise into anim data. This went into a previous build but has had a face lift and been made interactive as well.

 This demo was done on a test build so the UI's may expand a little by the time they hit a release.

As always, all suggestions are welcomed

Mark