Chris Hartelius - Tech Art

Dance Central Spotlight (2014)

Dance Central Spotlight is the 4th title in the series built for the Xbox One. Character models were updated with new art and cloth physics. I was a Technical Artist in charge of skinning and rigging, and all the secondary physics and cloth for the characters.

Character Cloth and Physics

Dance Central Series (2010-2012)

Motion Capture Support

For Dance Central 1 & 2, Harmonix installed our in-house motion capture studio, Phasespace. I helped with the installation and also provided tech support for mocap shoots.

'Mini Marcos' Tool

Dance Central has this iconic UI gameplay element on the sides to show the upcoming moves. On the first Dance Central game, however, these icons were all hand drawn by a single artist.

While we couldn't provide support for this during the first title, it quickly became a priority for the sequels. I took charge of building the tool to help generate these icons more quickly.

One of these dancers, Marcos, was used as our "Icon" template. We had character models of each choreographer for mocap, so I made some black & white toon shaders in 3dsMax to match the style.

I then designed and created a tool to switch between black or white materials for the whichever limb needed to be highlighted. We also had a set of arrows and names for each move that could be toggled on and off.

Now the artist just needed to scrub the timeline, add a new item to the list, and give it a name and some arrow icons. Once that was complete, they would be batch exported as png files.

Additional Credits

Harmonix Music Systems

Additional Credits:

Art Lead - Dare Matheson

Animation Lead - Riseon Kim

Animation - Andy Bouchard, Calvin Barreto, Jeff Carroll, Erin Young

Character Art Lead - Matthew Perlot

Character Art - Shawn Witt, Eliot Min, Jed Wahl

Environment Art Lead - Matthew Moore

Environment Art - David Boghdan, David Goodrich

UI Art - Adam Carriuolo, Jamie McKiernan