Icarus Studios News

Anyone remember those scenes in Clash of the Titans where the gods would take a lump of clay and fashion human beings however they saw fit then stick them on little shelves in Mt. Olympus’ coliseum until it was time to make them fight or die or mutilate them or whatever? Well, game designers—who are generally of mighty ilk but not exactly members of any pantheons—undergo a bit more involved process when designing people for online games. Luckily, at Icarus, we have developed several tool sets that help to make diverse human (and humanoid) characters.

Once a virtual landscape has been laid out, populating it with interesting characters and exotic creatures becomes a priority, as virtual worlds and MMO games are very much social, interactive, and visually driven experiences. Intriguing NPCs and customizable PC avatars are essential elements to any game’s success. Icarus uses something called the Character Prep tool to make, modify, and preview all manner of animated life forms.*

The first step is to load a pre-made male or female human form into Character Prep. Height, weight, and skin tone can all be tweaked at this time. You can turn on various bolt-ons, such as weapons, clothing, or jewelry. You can also toggle collision spheres, which will impact the way your model interacts with in-world objects. Once you’ve got the character’s basic frame to look as you wish, it’s time to slap on a head, using—wait for it; it’s not at all predictable, I swear to you—Icarus’ Head Editor. With the help of Head Editor’s simple graphical user interface, designers can change the facial bone structure, skin pigmentation, hair length and color (on both the head and face), tattoos, body paint, makeup, and piercings on every character they create. Because our engine lets us make thousands of unique, customized appearances with many diverse physical traits, characters’ heads are designed last, then loaded (along with the body frame) into the Base Editor (as described in a post coming soon). From there, designers can extract the coded data with Character Prep, in order to play animations (such as making facial expressions or turning the head) to see exactly how that model will be rendered in the virtual world.

Complex operations—e.g., taking an animated model (let’s say it’s of a dapper young man, running and shooting his gun at the same time) and synchronizing it with the proper sound effects (footsteps, gun firing, bullets impacting)—also can be easily adjusted and previewed before they are published in the game world. We use something called the Notetrack System to assign sound effects to animated characters, creatures, and objects. The Notetrack System is part of our Sound Prep tool, which provides an intuitive, visual way of programming sound into a virtual world. It’s possible to attach sounds to specific frames and locations on a model (the tick of a wrist watch, for example), which enables true 3D acoustics. Sound Prep possesses its own internal logic, which determines the volume, duration, range, and time of day that a sound occurs. Rather than hard-coding long, complex, and confusing scripts, Icarus’ Sound Prep lets the Sound Engineer place specific sounds and audio effects on a model or object by sliding them along the Notetrack System’s GUI. With one click, the game world is updated with newly placed sounds; this ensures there’s plenty of quality control testing before the product is finalized.  

(Continued in Part 2)

* Our 3D artists and Sound Engineers also work extensively with Character Prep—the reason being that users can simultaneously load, preview, and test their models, the blended animations of said models, and the sound effects that accompany the models, all thanks to this well-integrated program.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team