Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Red9 v1.31 - new Sound Menu

Just a really quick one to show you something that's gone in in the latest build (which I'll push out over the weekend). I've added Sound support to the TraxMenu as below. Nothing too special just a lot of useful small functions when dealing with audio in Maya.


I've been in Trax a lot recently purely because I'm getting facial lipSync setups sorted at work so am always messing around with audio. I was getting really frustrated, not just because in Maya2013 you CAN'T DELETE bloody audio from there any more! Features on this:


  • Delete selected - obvious one, delete selected audio nodes - gets over the bug in 2013 where tyou can't delete them unless you do it in the Outliner
  • Activate Selected Audio - pushes the selected audio node onto the timeline and turns it to be the active one, frustrating there isn't something like this already!
  • Set Timeline to Selected: works on multiple audio's, sets the timeline to the boundaries of the selected AUDIO nodes
  • Mute/unMute - obvious
  • Open Audio Path - open up the selected wav file source folder in explorer (linux/MacOS supported too)


Anyway, if anybody has any suggestions let me know, otherwise I'll ship this build as it is

cheers

Mark

Thursday, 16 May 2013

PoseSaver on Steroids!




Another Vimeo demo added, this one goes through the more advanced features in the Red9 PoseSaver, features aimed at giving the more technical among you access to expand and modify it's behavior on the fly. We use some of these features internally at work to tailor the behavior of specific folders, allowing us to store facial and finger data which need additional logic. I also go through the PoseCompare and hopefully shed a little more light on the filterPriorities and their relevance when loading relative poses.

This is build v1.31 which I'll release sometime over the weekend. For those of you following Red9 on Facebook you'll also have seen that the new pack includes Audio support via a new menu in the TraxEditor. I'm sick to death of Maya2013 not letting us delete sound from Trax so thought I'd add a few features to teh pack, including a few very simple but useful sound tools.

Still looking for more testers so if you want to get involved drop me a mail

cheers

Mark

Monday, 29 April 2013

MetaHUD - Monitoring any attrs in the Maya viewport - ChannelBox integration



And another Vimeo!

This one goes through the MetaHud node integration that's now on the popup menu in the ChannelBox. Really useful for debugging setups and monitoring data inside your rigs. The idea is really simple, it's makes a simple metaNode who's attributes are all monitored, all I do is add attrs to that node and connect those attrs up to the data I want them to monitor. Because it's a node you can wire this up to your rig and have it live there, monitoring any data you may need when debugging.

Still work in progress so any suggestions are more than welcome!

cheers
Mark

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Red9 MetaData Part3



Red9 MetaData Part 3! 

Third part in the MetaData series, this one starts to show you how to wire up a rig with the metaData backend

Any questions let me know

Mark

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

Red9 StudioPack v1.30 Released!

As per the previous post really, I've just release StudioPack v1.30 with a ton of fixes and updates. Been working on the ChannelBox RMB HUD integration, this is still kind of work in progress but it's been so useful at work that I couldn't resist pushing it into the build. Thanks again Mark

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Red9 Studio Pack Release 1.30

I'm gearing up for a new release v1.30 and thought I'd preempt it by pushing the latest change log out so you can see what to expect.
There's a ton of fixes and upgrades to a lot of the core code, if you're running metaData then I advice you take a look. There's also some neat new features gone in such as the RMB channelBox HUD integration for monitoring attrs in the Maya viewport. The PoseSaver has also had some core upgrades and now supports sub-folder poseHandler files for modifying the pose behaviour on a folder by folder basis.

This will probably go live in the next week

thanks for all the support

Mark

1.291:
------

  • Fix - Red9_Meta - type 'unicode' value's weren't being supported correctly in the setAttr func
  • Fix - Red9_Anim - MirrorSetup - loadMirror was failing to load custom Axis correctly.


1.292:
------

  • Fix - Red9_Meta - isChildNode() wasn't dealing with longNames correctly
  • Mod - Red9_PoseSaver - batchPatchPoses() modified to make it more flexible. added arg to stop it always resaving the pose after patchfunc has been run. also now passing poseFile back into patchfunc
  • New - Red9_PoseSaver - poseHandler.py support added! - This is a BIG deal for TD's out there as it gives you access to all the internal node handling at a sub-folder level. Allows you to fully customize the pose behaviour on a folder basis!
  • Fix - Red9_Anim - PoseUI wasn't remembering the last subFolderyou were in.


1.293:
------

  • New - Red9_Anim - PoseUI now has a RMB Make Directory call
  • New - Red9_Anim - PoseUI now has a 'Debug:Copy poseHandler.py to Folder'. This is an avanced option for by-passing the node handlers on a folder by folder basis!
  • Mod - Red9_Anim - 'Ctrl' click when launching the AnimationUI will boot it non-docked
  • Mod - Red9_Meta - Calls that previously only took an mType/mInstance as a [string] arg now also accept the class too... so r9Meta.getMetaNodes('MetaRig') and r9Meta.getMetaRig(r9Meta.MetaRig) both are accepted.
  • Mod - Red9_Meta - getChildren now takes an additional arg 'cAttrs' which can be used to only return children connected via a given attr name (this uses wildcards and will take a list)


1.294:
------

  • Fix - Red9_Anim - added full traceback to the error handling in the AnimUI
  • Fix - Red9_Meta - added full traceback to the error handling in the nodeLockManager and thus the main class
  • Fix - Red9_Meta - setAttr wasn't raising errors due to the decorator. Patched
  • Mod - Red9_Meta - updated MetaHUD, simplified event handler, now connected to refresh by default
  • New - Red9_Meta - Added HUD wrappers now being called by the ChannelBox RMB menu - gives you access to the MetaHud monitors and makes the setup more integrated


Thursday, 28 March 2013

Red9 Module Distribution.....Maya Extensions

I've been talking with Autodesk and it looks like Red9 Studio Pack will be a part of the new Maya Extensions site when it's launched, presumably alongside the release of 2014.

The extensions download and install with an exe which are packaged in line with Maya's modules so there's been a bit of package redesign in order to cope with this. At the moment this redesign is only in the build Autodesk have but I'm wondering what peoples thoughts are about rolling the restructure out for the main build?

What's different?

Not a lot to be honest, the main difference is that the 'startup', 'packages' and 'core' folders would live under a 'Red9/scripts' folder (as defined by the Maya module system design). When setting up the python path you'd point it to Red9/scripts rather than just Red9. Everything else in the systems and the boot would be the same.

Anybody got any thoughts?

Mark