| | PM Interview: Matthew Seymour
Quick—think of a great console sports game. Now, how many of you thought about tennis? Probably not many; for all the money and time poured into games recreating the experience of football, basketball, baseball, and golf, comparatively little attention has been paid to tennis. Power & Magic—the developer ofTop Spin™—is out to change all that. Program Manager Matthew Seymour took time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about how the team has made Top Spin the best-looking (and sounding) tennis game of all time.
Xbox.com: Your team went to great lengths to build realism into the game. What was harder: developing the game’s look, making it sound realistic, or getting the player models to move convincingly?
Seymour: The hardest part really was getting all three of these to work together to look the way it does now. Though, if I had to pick one, I’d say the toughest was instilling life into our most recognized licensed players: Pete Sampras, Anna Kournikova, and Martina Hingis. Many of us are very familiar with theses people, having seem them on TV or in print. We know them as the real deal, so when we make them for a game they have to glow with life—breathe, have that sparkle in the eyes, and the light has to shimmer off their skin. If you don’t have these things, the game is up! Our whole design was to make this game as immersive as possible, allowing for users to truly live out their fantasy of being a professional tennis player.
Xbox.com: Obviously, a great deal of work went into the facial animations for the players you feature, such as Kournikova and Lleyton Hewitt. Did your team have to break new ground to get the faces to move the way you wanted? What did your team do that other game makers haven’t done?
Seymour: We didn’t use any super cutting-edge technology; we just pushed traditional facial animation as far as it would go. Our faces are animated using a 64-bone setup. This mimics the muscular structure of the human face as closely as possible while still allowing for a great deal of flexibility and realism. We created a wide variety of key poses using this complex setup, which we used on all our characters, and it easily adapts to the geometry of each face. On top of all this, we created very specific facial poses for our licensed pro players; Pete Sampras and Gustavo Kuerten definitely do not smile the same way!
Xbox.com: Tell us a little about the motion capture sessions. How many players did you use? How many cameras were needed?
Seymour: We spent countless hours in the motion capture studio working mostly with top tennis teaching professionals as our motion models. However, we also captured the signature moves of Sampras, Kournikova, Hewitt, Jan-Michael Gambill, Hingis, Barbara Schett, and Sébastien Grosjean. To do this within their busy schedules, we shipped our entire mocap (motion capture) team and equipment to Miami right before the big NADAQ-100 Open Tournament. We rented a huge concert hall and literally built a tennis court inside. As to the equipment, we were very fortunate to have just purchased Vicon’s latest and greatest mocap system, and with only 16 cameras, we could get everything we used to get using 25. I am extremely happy with the results. All the animation feels and looks so good, especially when you’re playing the game as Sampras and go for the overhead smash—I mean, damn, it’s him, no doubt about it! There is nothing better than seeing that amazing smash of Pete’s on the screen, and you (as the player) are living it.
Xbox.com: Have you shown the game to the players who appear in Top Spin? How have they reacted to seeing themselves onscreen?
Seymour: Yes, many of them have seen themselves in the game, like Michael Chang, Gambill, Hewitt, and Sampras, to name just a few. Their first reaction is one of surprise. They cannot believe how much their virtual counterparts look like their own flesh and blood. Their second reaction is always the same, too: they are simply creeped out! It’s just too close to the real thing for them, especially when they see their own signature moves, which we got from motion-capturing them. You also have to remember a lot of these top pros have been in games before, as far back as the 16-bit days. So now when they see themselves in an Xbox game like this, it just blows them away how far we have come and everything we can do, right down to perfectly recreating the stubble on Pete Sampras’ face.
Xbox.com: How did you capture the game’s audio? Did you record actual tennis matches or were the sounds we hear in the game recorded in a studio or on a sound stage?
Seymour: Here again we leaned toward realism. Throwing a racquet or the squeak of tennis shoes was easily recreated in a Foley studio. However, it’s the crowd cheers and jeers that are tough. To get these perfect, we went to tons of professional matches, both indoor and outdoor, to record the crowd sounds. However, you can’t just stick a microphone out amongst the stands. You have to find all the proper spots in a stadium to grab the best sound, and you have to think about the size of the crowd. In Top Spin, like real-life, earlier matches in a tournament are not as packed compared to a big final between two top players, so we recorded crowd reactions from all kinds of different matches. So when you play in the first round of a minor pro tournament in Top Spin, you’ll hear more of a smattering of applause, but after you’re in a big-time finals match, the crowd will be deafening! Our sound design focuses on recreating the intense atmosphere of competitive sports where the swish, thud, or crash of every shot, slide, and dive seems to come from the pit of your stomach, and the roar of the crowd squeezes you like a vice.
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