The 'Dancing on Ice' project was passed to Infusion after a previous developer failed to meet publisher expectations. This left us with the prospect of completing the game on two platforms in four months so that the release could coincide with the new season of the show.
Unfortunately, the previous art quality meant that all assets needed to be built again. As the engine was built on the standard NW4R libraries, the tools supported a change of art pipeline, from Maya to MAX.
Initial task was to set the art-style. Taking inspiration from xbox LIVE's avatars, the character proportions were tweaked, and the previous developers use of skeletal facial animation was replaced with texture animations. The polygons used to provide the topology to support the original facial animation were redistributed, allowing us to give the characters proper hands.
Animation was the major art requirement for this project. 21 dances were planned for the game, although the music track selection was not locked down until a month and a half before the submission deadline. I went through the previous season for the TV show, identifying moves and sequences suitable for animating. I built up a library of these clips to give to the team to animate to. Once music choices were finalised, these animations clips were stitched together using Character Studio's motion flow tool. At the end of the project we were able to produce a three minute dance sequence in half a day.
Again, I took ownership of the export pipeline. Handling file export, defining material effects through the 3D Editor tool supplied with the NW4R SDK. The environments were outsourced to a local studio, with the slight hiccup of them utilising a newer version of MAX, resulting in the files needing a slight rebuild when we received them in .FBX format.
Dancing On Ice
|
|
