Strangle Hold: Midway Games creates the video game sequel to the John Woo film “Hard Boiled”
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Scheduled for release this winter for the Xbox 360, and PC, “Stranglehold” is Midway Games’ video game sequel to acclaimed director John Woo’s 1992 hit film, Hard-Boiled, which stars Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila, a tough cop who teams with an undercover agent to shut down a sinister mobster and his crew. The third-person action adventure game, which boasts intricately detailed interior and exterior environments set in Hong Kong and Chicago, features a photorealistic CG version of the actor complete with his signature fight moves, along with two dozen additional main characters. The Autodesk® 3D Animation Product Portfolio of 3ds Max®, Maya®, and MotionBuilder™ software is among the software Midway used to create this game.
All of the characters except for Tequila began life as sketches the artists created based on character bios and the script. Once they had nailed each character’s look, they built models of them in Maya and 3ds Max, rigged them in Maya, and animated them in MotionBuilder. In addition, they created robust facial rigs in Maya for lip syncing, and they created wrinkle displacement maps in Maya which they used in the game’s cinematics for character shots requiring scrunching and wrinkling of facial skin.
The creation process for Tequila was a bit different. Because that character is based on an actual person, the team scanned Chow Yun-Fat, the actor who portrayed him in the film, so they would have an accurate dataset from which to model the 3D version in Maya.
And because this is a sequel to a movie that’s almost 15 years old, they had to modify the character’s age substantially. To do so they started with a base scan mesh, and wrote some MEL scripts in Maya to deform the head topology to the shape of the scan data so that all of the Tequila facial animation was consistent. Then they worked with the actor’s representatives to dial in the age representation of Tequila that everyone felt comfortable with. The team also used Maya to rig the character.
As with the modeling process, animating Tequila was a bit more involved as well. First the team captured the motions of another actor performing the moves they were looking for, as directed by Midway. Then they cleaned the marker data and imported it into MotionBuilder for animation. But to faithfully reproduce in the game Tequila’s signature moves from the film, Midway had to create a substantial amount of animation.
In fact, the way Tequila moves is one of the things that make “Stranglehold” stand apart from other next-generation games. In the movie, Tequila is known for performing aerobatic moves while he’s firing his guns. For instance, he’ll run and then dive on top of a cart, which will roll across the room, with him on top shooting at his enemies. He can do that in the game, as well. If the character’s near a cart, the player just presses a button and Tequila run and then dive onto the cart, and it will roll across the floor automatically. And while the character is in that special move, the player can make the character aim and shoot around the room.
This is but one of the numerous moves from the film that Tequila can perform in the game. To generate all the Tequila moves, Midway had to create about 10 times the amount of motion you’d create for a typical third-person shooter, a task they accomplished by writing Python scripts for batch exporting out of MotionBuilder. In addition to Python scripts, they also wrote a substantial number of MEL scripts in Maya and MAXScripts in 3ds Max to automate other repetitive tasks.
Besides the way Tequila moves, another stand-out feature of “Stranglehold” is the fact that every one of the hundreds of objects in the game’s eight expansive levels is destructible. Shoot at a bag of rice, for instance, and rice will trickle through the bullet holes. Similarly, bullets can shatter windows and chip away at concrete pillars and walls. Once the bullets start flying, everything is fair game in terms of damage and destruction.
To support this level of object damage and destructibility, Midway had to create multiple versions of every object in the game—sometimes four or five states into which objects can degrade. Toward that end, one of the tools they used was the Pro Booleans Extension to 3ds Max, which adds extra intelligence to the process of performing Boolean operations. First, it combines topologies, determines co-planar triangles, and removes incident edges from the mesh. Next, it performs the Boolean operation on N-sided polygons, not on triangles. The mesh is then re-triangulated and its co-planar edges remain hidden. The result is clean high-quality meshes with fewer small edges and skinny triangles.
Additional features used in this project include auto-rigging, animation layers, and motion retargeting in MotionBuilder; and pelt mapping, normal mapping, and shade mapping in 3ds Max.