Happy Christmas! Early StudioPack v1.41 rc release for testing :)

Well I've been beavering away and thought I'd push the latest release candidate for v1.41 out to the download folder, well it is Christmas (I really should get a life, let the beer commence!)

 This build includes the initial implementation of the new AudioCompiler in the TraxEditor Red9 Sound menu:

This will take either, selected audioNodes or all audioNodes in Maya and compile them into a single wav file. It'll then import this new wav file and activate it. Why, well how many of you have tried to work with facial data and with multiple sound nodes in Maya, then cursed Maya when you try and playblast the scene only to have just 1 of those sounds play. It's a HUGE screw up, something that's been suggested on the Autodesk forums for years.

How the hell do most people work around it?? Well now you can do something about it. This also includes the new timeOffset RMB options in the timeline.

 As always, let me know how you get on.

The build is in the Download folder, follow the download link on the right!

 Happy Christmas

 Mark

Red9 Language packs??

This is great, Red9 in Chinese!! Big thanks to Jerry (sorry I don't know your second name) from the python google groups who sent me this last night. Seems like he's converted all of the Red9 UI's into chinese for his company to use.

Now that kind of begs the question, is multi-language support something others would be interested in? It's easy enough to modify the text in all the UI's to be pointers to a language pack similar to how Maya does it internally, question is, would there be enough call for this?

If you'd be interested let me know

cheers and a happy Christmas

Oh StudioPack v1.41 will be out over the weekend ;)

Mark

Red9 StudioPack - Time and Key Management

Hi all, thought I'd do a new demo to go through some of the new time management tools in the latest build v1.41 which I'll push out sometime over Christmas. Hopefully this all makes sense although there's so much more that I could expose here, just a case of not going to  mad with complex UIs and too many checkboxes.

Anyway, as always all feedback is very welcome

cheers

Mark

Red9 Studio Pack v1.40 Released

Well at long last I have a build I'm happy with so here it is, Red9 Studio Pack v1.40. This has been a long time coming and there's a number of posts already which go through the main updates.

If you've not already seen it pop onto Vimeo and watch the update v1.40 video. As usual the download link is off the Google Drive link below. Seems like Google have been playing with GDrive and as always it's totally un-obvious how to actually download a zip file! Open the link, when it pops up there's now a download arrow bottom right next to the open button.

http://red9-consultancy.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Download

At some point I'll get round to doing a proper Red9 web site with download links. I also keep meaning to move to a GIT repository to give you all access to all the commits.

Anyway as always, any issues or feedback mail me. If you'd like to get involved or are using the pack in production I'd love to hear from you. There's a lot of stuff under the hood which can easily be exploited as I am at work.

cheers

Mark

Buy me a Beer....

Spotted the new button ;) Well why the hell not, it takes a hell of a lot of effort to keep the project going and lots of evenings and weekends. got to love paypal thanks to all the testers Mark

Red9 StudioPack v1.40 - update video :)

Well it's nearly time for another release of the pack, this one will be a big one as there's been a hell of a lot of development behind the scenes to optimize and streamline the workflows. Thought I'd do an update video as it's far easier than trying to write it all down!

Highlights of v1.40:

• New - 'Use Priority as SnapList' in the hierarchy tab. This is THE biggest upgrade for a while, see the video as this is a massive optimization and gets over a ton of issues.
• New Presets in the hierarchy for Stewart, TSM and Andy rigs - these need testing.
• Object and CharacterSets are now handled like any other hierarchy in the filters.
• Red9 HUD integration in the channelBox has been upgraded and now supports both simple Hud elements and sliders.
• Pose Relative upgraded to support the new Snap methods
• SnapTransforms now upgraded to support the new Snap methods
• Track N Stabilize upgraded, now supports separated trans and rots in the tracker. 
• SnapTransforms plugin now takes tran and rot flags
• More functionality in the InteractiveCurve UI
• MirrorUI upgraded, now allows a pre-clear when loading mirrorMaps.

Hopefully I'll be pushing this pack out in the next week or so

cheers

Mark

God Damned ANIM LAYERS!!!

So all animators love the animLayers in Maya right, the problem is that from a pipeline point of view they're an utter cluster fuck!

I've been doing some serious optimizations to the snapTransforms code in the pack, you can now use the filterPriorities list in the hierarchy tab as a list of nodes which will be snapped during the process. Let me explain, you have feet, wrists and COG all in the same space, normally parented under a global rig controller. Now all other controllers in rigs are normally children of these, or at least children of a subset of nodes. Ie, your head controller is a child of the shoulders, so as long as the shoulders are in the correct space, then the data on the head should just be able to be copied over, no need to run a snap..

In the current build I pass all nodes returned from the hierarchy filter to the snap list, so even things like fingers would be on it, makes no sense. It's also something we were doing at Eurocom for years to speed up snapping rig animations.

So cutting to the point, this all works and I've tried it on a Morpheus sequence, over a 100frames it was just over 10 times faster, yippee!!!! Except one of the animators at work found an issue that arises in this logic from animLayers.

There is currently no code to copyKeys in Maya that respects animLayers, all you get are the current active animLayer keys copied over, which now means if you've got adjustment layers on your nodes I can no longer rely on being able to just copyKey data on subNodes as layers gets in the way.

Think a warning dialogue will have to do for the time being, I'm looking at teaching the Red9.copyKeys about layers, either have it flatten them automagically or rebuild them on the destination nodes

Mark