Tony Hawk's Project 8
- September 14, 2006 19:32 PM PST
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We recently took a trip to the Neversoft studios for some hands-on time with Tony Hawk's Project 8 for the Xbox 360, and got a sneak peek of what to expect from the birdman on the PlayStation 3.
The Birdman catches some major air in the park
Neversoft has hit the mark this time around and they've got every right to be proud of it. And proud of Tony Hawk's Project 8 they are as the majority of the visit was spent introducing us to their high tech in-house Motion Capture studio, where 63 days of hard work and long hours make up the reference for nearly every animation you see in the game. From the skaters, the tricks, down to the smallest of detail such as the flex in the skateboard; all was motion captured as reference for the animators to create ultra realistic and seamlessly smooth transitions from one animation to the next.
Accurate to the sub-millimeter, Neversoft's mo-cap studio captured every flick of the foot from Rodney Mullen's sweet-street savvy to the high-flying aerials of Tony Hawk. No pro within the game has his or her own unique individual style, as each pro contributed their technique to the overall look and feel of the game. So, if Tony Hawk's kickflip looked better than Daewon Song's, you'll see Tony's kickflip mapped throughout every skater in the game.
From the mo-cap data, the animators had the best of reference to make the skaters in the game move and react like real skaters. This is the first project for Neversoft to be based solely on mo-cap. The cinematics in Gun and Tony Hawk's American Wasteland used mo-cap data, but the caliber of animations is no where near what Neversoft has created for Project 8.
From the Drawing Board
We were then exposed to the nifty tricks for creating the highly detailed and almost life-like characters within Project 8. As Bob Burnquist stood fully rendered on a computer screen, Lead Character Artist Chris George explained the process of getting the skaters scanned and into the game. There are two 3D scans taken of each pro, a low-poly scan for the body to simulate the wrinkles in the clothes and a high-poly scan for the face. Reference photos are taken of each pro with a 22 mega-pixel camera, that's a lot of detail, and then the normal and texture maps are applied. To get an idea of how high poly we are talking, characters in Project 8 are around 7,000 polygons, that's roughly double the detail from American Wasteland on the Xbox and PS2.
Needless to say this is the best looking Tony Hawk game yet, and one of the better looking games for the Xbox 360. No matter which goofy outfit you choose, the clothing looks real enough touch, and Neversoft has gone to the extreme littering the enormous environment with little touches that make it that much more realistic. With so much work to be done, Neversoft has grown from 40 employees to 130 talented industry professionals for the next generation of Tony Hawk games.
They're not aviators, but they'll do
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