Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
February 2010 32 n n n n Gaming documentaries, including e Beatles Anthol- ogy, giving them an accurate portrait of the looks and mannerisms of their larger-than-life subjects. e references additionally provided a time capsule for the artists in terms of the venues, outfits, and hairstyles for the various stages in the band's career. Experts both inside and outside the studio provided answers that enabled the Harmonix team to meticulously replicate the outfits that the performers wore for each of their concerts, as well as the in- struments they used for recordings and live performances. "People here became these uber Beatles fans— more than we already were," says Randall. Despite the plethora of available source ma- terial, capturing the likeness of the four musi- cians was incredibly difficult, says Lesser. "We knew early on that was the most important thing, to get their likeness correct," he adds. To this end, a small team of character artists worked on the models throughout the entire year and a half of production, tweaking them to fit perfectly within each scene. "ese are the four most recognizable peo- ple in the world, and everyone knows how they look, how they move, and what happens to their faces when they smile," says Randall, "all those details we knew we had to get right. Even with all the reference, it was hard to pin down these guys' looks. ey appeared differ- ent picture to picture." Lesser agrees, adding, that at times the group believed it had the perfect model, and then another reference would make it look like "a different person." Creating Legends Using Autodesk's 3ds Max and Pixologic's ZBrush, the artists crafted the character models, which are stylized as opposed to hyper-realistic, keeping in tune with the look of the other Rock Band music video games from Harmonix. "e hyper-realistic look doesn't seem as fun or in- teresting to us," says Lesser. "And the Uncanny Valley problem would have been more of a problem for us than you have in most games because we were not inventing new characters. ese were people who folks could describe in detail with their eyes closed." According to Lesser, Harmonix had a solid technique in place from its other titles for crafting the heads and bodies of the characters. Nevertheless, the modelers started to develop a slightly new way of working on the heads, which included prototyping in ZBrush, doing quick sculpts, before handing the model over to artist Shawn Witt, who was proficient at paint-overs. He would then adjust the model and get it closer to the desired look. At that point, Jed Wahl and Brian Parnell transferred the model back into Max for further work. "We have a style for the game that is related to the Rock Band series, which is that things are typically more smooth and planar, with hard angles and edges on the models," explains Lesser. "With things like clothing and hair, we found we could use Max and the smoothing ability it offered to get the kind of end results we wanted much faster and with sharper detail than when we would go into ZBrush, which is where we typically do our flesh-based work." Harmonix utilized 3ds Max's poly editing tools, specifically chamfer and turbosmooth to attain the smooth, stylized surfaces of the clothing and hair. For this particular group of assets, the technique proved to be effective and fast compared to Harmonix's typical pipeline through ZBrush. Character lead Steve Kimura and art lead Dare Matheson directed the artists, trying to get them to find that sweet spot between the stylized and realistic representations. Once the group was satisfied with the model, it was sent off to Apple for approval. And as Lesser notes, "ey [the shareholders] were very good at telling us what was missing. ey were in- vested in this, so they were big participants in the process." Initially, the artists planned to use more than one model for each character spanning the seven or so years depicted in the game. But once the modelers changed the hairstyles, there was no need to re-sculpt the faces, ex- plains Randall. In terms of the clothing, the modelers had used ZBrush in the past, but came up with a technique that enables them to do that work in 3ds Max. "Retaining the model inside Max kept us moving and gave us the style we want," Randall says. e dynamics for the cloth oc- cur in real time, thanks to in-house coding scripted mainly by James Fleming. Driving the dynamics is Milo, Harmonix's proprietary game engine. You Move Me Animation proved just as important to the game's focus as the modeling. All the body ani- mations were done with MotionBuilder and brought into the game engine. Depending on the needs of the face, clothing, hairstyle, mouth, hands, and dynamics, each character model had approximately 115 bones. In addition, the crew used motion capture for both body and facial movement, particu- larly for the simulated musical performances. Mainly they worked with a group of tribute bands and performers, who played through the songs. e mocap was done at Curious Pictures in New York City with a 23-camera Vicon sys- tem using two distinct camera setups for body and facial capture, and then processed within Autodesk's MotionBuilder and delivered to Harmonix in that format. e animators worked in MotionBuilder, where they spliced the mocapped actions into various sequences. "We paid a lot of attention to how e Beatles interacted with their instruments, mi- crophones, and with each other," says Lesser. "We do that in our other games, but in par- ticular, the way e Beatles reacted to their stage surroundings and to one another was unique. And between the mocap, animation, and technology, we made sure their manner- isms came through in the performances de- picted in the game." Moving into new territory, the animators The Harmonix artists replicated historical venues from The Beatles' concerts, such as this one, from the band's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.