Red9 offers production services, but also develops some great tools for animators who work in Maya. The Red9 Studio Pack and soon-to-be-released Red9 ProPack set out to speed up animation workflow. The Red9 StudioPack is available for free through the Autodesk App Store (one of the few apps to be officially certified by Autodesk).
Behind Red9 is Mark Jackson and Franco Bresciani, two CG veterans who are passionate about sharing their knowledge. Watch Mark will offer a wider overview of the ProPack and what it is like to work with Red9 on a professional level. The first video shows off their Puppet Rig and support systems.
Red9’s Puppet Rig is a bespoke procedural rigging system that they designed from the ground up to be fast, robust and feature-rich. The system supports both bipedal and quadruped characters and other configurations with it’s modular design. The heart of the Red9 Puppet Rig is an internal MetaData system that is exposed through the Studio Pack API. This type of architecture allows you to interface with the rig through a simple python object which reveals most of the animation and management functions directly. Things like pose handlers, animation library, mirror functions, pose compare and many other vital functions are all wrapped for you.
Mark shows off the new DagMenu system and dynamic character picker. Mark also mentions about the rig: “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.”
More information on the puppet rig can be found in the documentation. While the rig doesn’t look like its part of any of the packs, it does look impressive!
