Harmonics Music Systems Inc – Dance Central in Max
Game developer uses Autodesk 3d studio Max and Motionbuilder software to make a strikingly realistic video game that incorporates 90 dance routine and over 650 dance moves.
Summary
It is 2005 when Harmonix Music Systems burst onto the video game scene with Guitar Hero, the now legendary “and addictive” video game in which players simulate playing lead guitar on their favorite rock songs. The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Corporation upped the ante in 2007 when it released Rock Band, which allowed persons or teams to play guitar, drums, or sing songs from bands counting The Beatles, Green Day, and a host of others. Now, Harmonix is encouraging people to get up and dance with Dance Central, an extraordinarily ambitious new title that coincided with the let go of the Kinect for Xbox 360, which enables players to manage and interact with the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft through usual gestures and spoken commands.
Dance Central lets the players choose one of the eight characters whose actions they mirror and, by learning various dance goes and routines, perform, work out, or compete against other players, every one without a handheld controller. Using a combination of Autodesk 3d stuido Max and Autodesk MotionBuilder software, Harmonix has formed a strikingly realistic new game.
The Challenge
While rapid advancement in motion capture technology have by now enabled video game enthusiasts to closely mirror the stroke of animated characters, the creators of Dance Central clearly wanted to get things to a whole new level.
“We wanted Dance Central to be a completely full motion dance experience,” says Dare Matheson, lead artist on the game. “Our vision for the game was not just tracking creature positions of the player’s body at different points in time, but clearly and precisely tracking full-body motion through time, while scoring them on the total dance moves they are executing.”
Working intimately with a team of choreographers and dancers, Harmonix would finally develop 90 dance routines and over 650 dance moves for Dance Central. Matheson continue: “We wanted people, even if they’d never danced before, to be able to learn and do the routines while receiving feedback and correction. To do that, we built a system that would enable Kinect to not simply track their motions, but also be relevant and compare their routines to our choreographed routines. Obviously, that is an very organic and open-ended task for a computer to handle well, but we were determined to see it come to life.”
The Solution
While the avatar characters in the Rock Band series are compelling in their own right, they are also typically customized by the players who will inhabit them. For Dance Central, however, the Harmonix team wanted to exhibit the kind of personalities that only dance can bring out.
“For Dance Central, the characters are not just tools; they are the interface,” says Matheson. “We were super-psyched about creating a limited set of distinctive personalities from start to finish. We wanted our characters and animations to look mind-blowingly flat and gorgeous. Autodesk 3d studio Max and MotionBuilder were totally crucial to that achieving our vision.”
“The excellence of animation was vital to the success of Dance Central,” agrees Riseon Kim, lead animator at Harmonix. “We used motion capture for each song and routine, as well as for unique introductions for every character. We spent a good amount of time building and testing our character rig in 3d stuido Max and coming up with some tricks to make things work. After creating and testing our character rig in 3d studio Max, we used MotionBuilder to carry on working on motion captured data. It was crucial for the animators to create everything look very clear and understandable for the players. The animation had to be exaggerated and all dance moves had to be absolutely accurate. We found the Story mode in Motion Builder very helpful when we needed to blend two different clips and merge animations on different characters with no trouble. The easy import and export capabilities between 3d studio Max and MotionBuilder were also helpful when we were working on our character rigs which involved a lot of going back and forth between the two software.”
The Results
In addition to the better character rig created in 3d studio Max, the Harmonix team was able to make a multitude of custom rigs for various body parts. “Achieving a complete and believable range of motion in dancing characters can be a big challenge,” says Matheson. “Using 3d studio Max, we were able to develop techniques to help keep body parts from collapsing from extreme limb positions. We discovered, for example, that when a character’s leg kicked high, the butt would totally flatten out. With 3d studio Max, we were able to make a ‘booty rig’ to prevent that problem. We then used MotionBuilder to smooth and polish the animations until they were seamless.
“We required our characters and animations to look mind-blowingly smooth and gorgeous. Autodesk 3d studio Max and MotionBuilder were absolutely crucial to achieving our vision.”
—Dare Matheson, Lead Artist, Harmonix
Download the Story
Harmonix Dance Central Customer Story (pdf – 839Kb)