Raise up Your Goblet of Rock to the Makers of Guitar Hero World Tour
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Capturing the Avatar

Of course, the coolest thing about Guitar Hero is that you're not just hitting notes by following a bouncing ball; you're playing keg parties and dive clubs, wending your way up the rock and roll food chain till you're selling out massive arenas. Well, not you, but your avatar. "With the development of Guitar Hero III for Xbox 360 and PS3, we really ramped up our avatar development with motion capture," says Bright. "In fact, we built a mo-cap studio and hired a motion capture team with a cinematic director."

Motion capture, or performance capture, is the process of recording the actions of human actors and using that data to animate digital character models in 3D animation environments like the game engine or Maya. The performers are outfitted with skin tight "flak suits" (they're used to it, what with all the Spandex®), covered with little light balls that capture their actions—singing, strumming, strutting, smashing guitars—on infra-red cameras. "We have thirty digital cameras capturing the action from every angle," says Bright.

Neversoft built a motion capture studio to record rock stars such as Sting, Smashing Pumpkins' front man, Billy Corgan, and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. Clip courtesy of RedOctane and Neversoft. (Click to play.)

Close Move

The camera movements themselves can also be motion-captured so that a virtual camera in the scene will pan, tilt, or dolly around the stage driven by a camera operator, which means the computer -generated characters, images, and sets will have the same perspective as the video images from the camera. Developers use "match move" software such a boujou, to composit, or digitally "blend," this live action and virtual footage.

"To capture more intricate facial mannerisms and expressions—snarls and sneers—we put dots, or markers, all over the face, and position ten to fifteen cameras around the performer at close range," Bright explains. An object with markers attached at known positions is used to calibrate the cameras and obtain their positions. As long as two calibrated cameras see a marker, a three-dimensional fix can be obtained, "and the face gets mapped to the skeleton in the game," says Bright. During these video-based motion capture sessions, a real-time, "stick figure" version of the performer—a model for the 3D object—is projected to ensure the motion is being captured correctly.

Smashing Pumpkin's front man, Billy Corgan is immortalized in World Tour. Image courtesy of RedOctane and Neversoft.

The Guitar Hero avatars not modeled on real rockers such as Slash or Steven Tyler are modeled on one versatile performer. "He comes in, he can snarl like Billy Idol, or just give us a range of 'rock star' moves, and our avatars are so highly stylized, it works," claims Bright, whose team recently had the privilege of creating a Jimi Hendrix avatar for World Tour. "We hired the foremost Jimi Hendrix impersonator in the world for the mo-cap," says Bright, "and then used lots of reference material, period photographs and books, to get the specific texture (everything on the surface of the 3D object, such as hair and skin tone, eye color, etc.) exactly right." Adding to the pressure of accurately rendering an icon was the desire of the Hendrix estate for the guitar god to be depicted in a very specific way. "Early Hendrix, but not Woodstock Hendrix," clarifies Flores.

Three new Hendrix master tracks will be available for download in mid-November: the blues track "If 6 was 9," "Little Wing," and a live version of "Fire," along with tunes by the Raconteurs. The Raconteurs make their debut appearance in a videogame with three master tracks off their second album Consolers of the Lonely: "Salute Your Solution," "Hold Up" and "Consoler of the Lonely." And Guitar Hero is experimenting with what are known as "day and date releases"—master recordings released in Guitar Hero at the same time as the CD and digital downloads are available—from artists like Metallica and Coldplay.

Master Class

At first, artists were reluctant to release their master recordings to the game (a combination of the underlying publishing rights, as well as performance), and early Guitar Hero recordings were high-end covers. But, rock royalty relented once they witnessed the promotional power of GH, best exemplified by Dragonforce—the most popular mega-metal band you never heard of before their blistering "Through the Fire and Flames" became the song to beat in Guitar Hero III. (Just don't ask the band whether they can beat their own songs; the answer is "yes," but they are so over that question.)

For World Tour, the entire set list is original master recordings, including live numbers by Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jimi Hendrix. And, of course, Guitar Hero took the master recording concept one step further by creating a game based on the career of a single band, Aerosmith, for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. "It was guitarist Joe Perry's son who convinced him to jump on the Guitar Hero tour bus," says Flores.

More single-artist focused versions of the game are in the works, but don't hold your breath for Jimmy Page or Robert Plant avatars any time soon. Page is notoriously protective of Led Zeppelin's master recordings, which have rarely been licensed for film or commercial use (One notable exceptions is "That's the Way" on the Almost Famous soundtrack—well, Cameron Crowe's quasi-memoir was a thinly-veiled roman a clef about his experience covering the band for Rolling Stone; other exceptions are "Immigrant Song" in School of Rock and that dreadful Cadillac commercial starring Cindy Crawford.). While acknowledging that Led Zeppelin would be a stunning "get," says Kai: "We're ready for players to create their own 'master tracks' in the GH Music Studio."

"Four players can jam together, making original music, then appoint an engineer," says Flores of the revolutionary, new the GH Music Studio module. Working with the guitar controller, the engineer can compose, arrange, and mix on a virtual mixing board complete with faders and volume and panning control. "Creating the interface was kind of tricky," Bright acknowledges, "since we were limited to the functionality of the guitar controller." Users can mini-navigate with the strum bar, and use the directional pad to control "snap" values as composers move through the musical timeline. "When you lay down your track, you can define your scale and tempo, and even rip the recorded song to MP3 or, of course, upload to GHTunes," says Bright, who is hoping that budding songwriters get their feet wet with the GH Music Studio, then jump into the Garage Band and Pro-Tools pools.

The GH Music Studio virtual mixing board. Image courtesy of RedOctane and Neversoft.

According to Bright and Flores, some 10,000 original songs have already been uploaded to GHTunes—YouTube sensation "WTF" is currently the most popular—for which Neversoft built a huge back-end data storage system. Asked if the company is concerned about players "composing" and uploading songs they're yearning to play in Guitar Hero—like the Led Zeppelin cannon—Flores insists the content will be closely monitored for copyright infringement. "No, we're not spidering, like Google with YouTube," he admits, "because the audio imprint won't work with users' interpretations of copyrighted material." Instead, users will be asked to flag questionable content, and monitors will troll the site for that illicit version of "Stairway to Heaven."

"More than anything, we're looking to make Guitar Hero a conduit of social connection," says Kai. "Friends and families can jam together, and make music together, then share it online." Like South Park's Stan, who eventually kicks his "Heroin Hero" addiction to reunite with Kyle and beat the game. Then it's Cartman and Butters' turn to get hooked.