“NBA Street Homecourt” by Electronic Arts

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Conference:


Title:


    NBA Street Homecourt

Company / Institution / Agency:


  • Electronic Arts

Description:


    NBA Street Homecourt is the first NBA street game for next-generation consoles. This clip shows some of the courts, players, and animation used in the game. All of the footage is rendered at 60 frames per second, in real-time, on an Xbox360.

    The motion was created with a mixture of motion cap-ture and key-framed animation, blended in our proprietary run-time animation tool. The animation also highlights the use of our run-time Procedural Awareness tool, which lay-ered attitude on top of the characters’ performance. Cloth physics were applied to the shorts and shirts by a proprie-tary physics solver written for NBA Street Homecourt. The character and environments were built using custom tools and pipelines. Modeled from photo reference using sub-division surfaces and normal maps, we achieved stunning player likeness. The environments were modeled accu-rately to location maps using extensive photo reference. The environment lighting was baked offline, with a custom global-illumination system. Colour correction, bloom, and vignette real-time post effects were layered on to com-plete the overall mood of the piece.

Hardware:


    IBM Intel, Windows Desktop PCs
    IBM Blade Servers
    Xbox360 Development Kits

Software:


    Modeling: Maya 7.0
    Character Modeling: ZBrush
    Character Animation: Motion Builder
    Programming: Visual Studio
    In-Game Animation: Autodesk HumanIK
    NBA Street Homecourt game software
    ANT: EA’s character-animation tool
    RShade3: custom environment lighting tool and baker SAM: asset management tools and pipelines Tweakaroo: custom shader and real-time FX editor Fan: custom crowd tool

Additional Contributors:


    Art Director: Mike Young

    CG Supervisor: Ryan Cleven

    Animation Director: Simon Sherr

    Character Lead: Ryan Santos

    Character CG Supervisor: John Cruz

    Lighting Lead: Malcolm Andrieshyn

    Character Lighter: Hafid Roserie

    Environment Lead: Alan Jarvie

    Environment CG Supervisor: Sinisa Karolic

    Rendering Lead Programmer: Stu McKenna

    Environment Rendering Programmer: Derek Sibelle

    Video Editor: Trevor Delahaye