Customer Showcase

The Challenge
While rapid advancements in motion capture technology have already enabled video game enthusiasts to closely mirror the action of animated characters, the creators of Dance Central clearly wanted to take things to a whole new level.

"We wanted Dance Central to be an absolutely fullmotion dance experience," says Dare Matheson, lead artist on the game. "Our vision for the game was not just tracking individual positions of the player’s body at different points in time, but clearly and precisely tracking full-body motions through time, while scoring them on the complete dance moves they are executing."

Working closely with a team of choreographers and dancers, Harmonix would eventually develop 90 dance routines and over 650 dance moves for Dance Central. Matheson continues: "We wanted people, even if they’d never danced before, to be able to learn and perform the routines while receiving feedback and correction. To do that, we built a system that would enable Kinect to not only track their motions, but also apply and compare their routines to our choreographed routines. Obviously, that is an extremely 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 smooth and gorgeous. Autodesk 3ds Max and MotionBuilder were absolutely crucial to that achieving our vision."

"The quality of animation was vital to the success of Dance Central," agrees Riseon Kim, lead animator at Harmonix. "We used motion capture for every song and routine, as well as for unique introductions for each character. We spent a good amount of time building and testing our character rig in 3ds Max and coming up with some tricks to make things work. After creating and testing our character rig in 3ds Max, we used MotionBuilder to continue working on motion captured data. It was crucial for the animators to make everything look very clear and understandable for the players. The animation had to be exaggerated and every dance move had to be absolutely accurate. We found the Story mode in Motion Builder very useful when we needed to blend two different clips and merge animations on different characters easily. The simple import and export capabilities between 3ds 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 larger character rig created in 3ds Max, the Harmonix team was able to create a multitude of custom rigs for various body parts. "Achieving a full and believable range of motion in dancing characters can be a big challenge," says Matheson. "Using 3ds 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 completely flatten out. With 3ds Max, we were able to create a ‘booty rig’ to prevent that problem. We then used MotionBuilder to smooth and polish the animations until they were seamless."