User Stories

Hoyle Casino

Sierra Entertainment's Hoyle Casino is the best-selling casino game of all time. With an easy-to-use user interface, entertaining artificial intelligence, loads of special features, and 14 authentic Vegas games, Hoyle Casino provides endless fun for novice and expert gamblers alike.

One of the most popular features of Hoyle Casino—as well as Hoyle Card Games and Hoyle Board Games—is the computer opponents. With their robust AI and entertaining antics, the Hoyle characters help the Hoyle line of games stand out from the rest of the casual gaming market. They are one of the main selling points of the titles, giving consumers a reason to spend $29.95 on a Hoyle product instead of simply playing blackjack for free online, or downloading a shareware version of hearts.

In 2000, it was decided to bring Hoyle Casino's animated opponents into the 3D world for the first time. I suggested Poser as an option for this process, but the team ultimately decided to go with Maya. That year, it took three artists eight months to make eight animated characters using Maya. While the artists did an amazing job of building the characters from scratch in that time, the producer was unhappy with the time and money required for the process. Three copies of Maya and the training time required to use it effectively chewed up much of the art resources for the project. In hindsight, Maya was clearly overkill given the needs of the game, and the Hoyle artists found themselves wondering if there was a better sulution.

Near the end of the Hoyle Casino development cycle, it was clear that the artists would not have time to create the additional 20 "shadow" characters needed to complete the character art for Hoyle Casino. Shadow characters are avatars players choose to represent themselves in the game. Shadow characters blink, but don't speak or have complex animations like the Hoyle characters do. I had been using Poser for a couple of years, and felt it was quite capable of creating high-quality shadow characters in a short amount of time. The producer asked me to make as many as I could with Poser before the art deadline, which loomed three weeks away.

I made the first two characters in one evening. The development team was amazed not only by the time it had taken me to create them, but by the fact that they looked as good or better than the Hoyle characters that had taken months to make with Maya. By the art deadline, I had created 24 shadow characters using Poser. Suddenly, the Hoyle development team's perception of Poser had changed; they now saw that it was clearly a viable tool for the art staff.

The more art I created, the more the art director and producer were impressed with what Poser could do for our product line. They could see a clear progression in art quality using Poser. I was tasked with creating 10 new characters for Hoyle Casino using Poser and DAZ in only four months. This included designing, rendering, animating, lip-syncing, animation syncing, and completing post-production for all 10 characters. The pressure was on; four months to do alone what had taken three artists eight months to do using Maya, and I had two extra characters on my plate! Fortunately, five of the characters were only art updates of previous characters, and would retain the dialog and mannerisms of their previous incarnations. One character being updated wore a hat and jewelry that we wanted to keep from her old version. I saved those models out of Maya, and had no problems importing them into the Poser scene files.

To make the 10 characters, I used Poser, DAZ models Victoria and Michael, DAZ props and textures, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects. I used Photoshop to create some textures, but I used it primarily as a way to prepare the rendered files from Poser before their final stop in After Effects. Adobe After Effects was a critical tool for bringing all the renders from Poser together to make the final files. I adjusted colors, fixed problems, added shadows, and set up the animations for the characters entirely in After Effects.

Once I had all the characters designed, I created the necessary mouth movements, smiles, and eye blinks needed to lip-sync the 8,500 lines of character dialog in the game. There were also dozens of animations for each character—yawning, face-scratching, making a funny face, and looking around—that required syncing. I used a combination of off-the-shelf and proprietary software, as well as hand-syncing, to sync the animations and dialog. All files where created on a G4 Power Macintosh with 448 megabytes of RAM, although some files were rendered on a ulder G3 Power Macintosh so I could use the G4 for the post-production creation of the final files.

In the end, I didn't make all of the animations for the characters I wanted to, because I simply ran out of time. That was a minor setback, though—the benefits of Poser and DAZ enabled me to out-produce our Maya-based process by a wide margin, and it has redefined our approach to Hoyle character creation across our product line.

Will Barker

(Note: As for the rest of the art in Hoyle Casino, we use the following software tools: Electric Image, EI Modeler, Form*Z, Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.)

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