Tuesday, January 28th, 2025Posted by Jim ThackerRed9 ProPack gets new tools created for Sonic the Hedgehog 3html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Red9s demo of the character and facial rig it created for Sonic from Sonic the Hedgehog 3. New tools developed for the work are now available in Red9 ProPack, its Maya animation toolkit.Character rigging specialist Red9 has updated Red9 ProPack, its animation pipeline environment for Maya, with new tools developed as part of its work on Sonic the Hedgehog 3.The public version of ProPack now includes Transfer Deformation Stack, used to build the deformer stack that controls Sonics face, and Ripple Animation, used for the quills on his head.Putting AAA developers character animation workflows into the hands of smaller studiosIntended to give smaller studios access to the same kind of workflows as AAA game developers and large VFX studios, Red9 ProPack is a suite of over 40 custom UIs and hundreds of individual tools to streamline character animation workflows.Artists can connect their own character rigs to its systems, which include animation retargeting and repathing, Perforce integration for version control, and custom exporters.The ProPack is an expanded version of Red9 founder and former Crytek technical animation director Mark Jacksons open-source Maya toolkit, Red9 Studio Tools.Now includes tools developed during rig development for Sonic the Hedgehog 3The ProPack has now been extended with new tools developed during Red9s own work on hybrid live-action/CG animated movie Sonic the Hedgehog 3.The company was contracted to do all of the character and facial rigging, creating base assets that were then distributed to the six key VFX facilities working on the film.The rigs were built entirely using native Maya nodes to minimize compatibility problems between studios.New Transfer Deformation Stack and Ripple Animation toolsTwo tools were developed for the movie, Transfer Deformation Stack and Ripple Animation.Transfer Deformation Stack (above) transfers skinning and deformation from one object to another, and was written to build up the deformer stack that controls Sonics face in the movie.Red9 used it to bounce deformation between objects for example, from the eyelids to the geometry for the eye meniscus breaking up the evaluation graph into small components.The components could then be processed in separate CPU threads to avoid performance bottlenecks.Speaking to CG Channel, Mark Jackson called it a life-changer when dealing with blendshapes, noting that without it, Red9 couldnt have had the final rig run in real time.The second tool, Ripple Animation, was developed to create the overlapping secondary motion of the quills on the back of Sonics head.The new tools were actually added to the ProPack last year, in the 02_09_24 release, but Red9 has only just been able to publicise them following the release of the movie.Red9 also modified the Red9 PuppetRig and several other existing tools in the ProPack for its work on the project, and to accommodate requests from the VFX studios working on the movie. Pricing and system requirementsRed9 ProPack is compatible with Maya 2020+ on Windows, Linux and macOS. It is rental-only, with subscriptions costing 39.99/month (around $50/month) or 450/year ($560/year).Read more about Red 9s work on Sonic the Hedgehog 3See an overview of Red9 ProPacks features in the products YouTube channelHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.Latest NewsRed9 ProPack gets new tools created for Sonic the Hedgehog 3Maya animation toolkit for VFX and games gets new tools developed for Red9's character rigging work on the latest Sonic movie.Tuesday, January 28th, 2025JangaFX teases IlluGenThe EmberGen dev's new app will be a 'better way to create the majority of assets' for VFX in games. 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