AT&T NBA All-Star Playmaker Arcade
Scanned fans playing basketball against Paul George and Vince Carter — and the pipeline that made every body type work.
AT&T brought the XR Avatar Scanner to NBA All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City. Two games: Dunk Champion and Dribble Dash. Fans on site played as themselves against Paul George, Vince Carter, and a set of NBA mascots. People at home could play a web version.
The games needed playable scanned avatars, NBA-player variants, kids, mascots, basketballs that behaved, and a replay video at the end. That is a lot of ways for a retarget to fail.
What I did
I had two jobs on this one, and they were connected.
On animation, I was the lead. I split dunk and running work across internal and external animators, set blocking-to-polish reviews, and gathered reference for Paul George, Vince Carter, and the basketball movement we actually needed. I gave notes on runs, crossovers, jump trajectories, landings, and how the animation would read against the camera. I retargeted blocking onto the production low-poly rigs and built alternate basic dunks that could live with code-driven horizontal and vertical movement. I personally animated at least two flare dunks: ball from behind the back to a front catch, and a toss-up into a left-hand catch that goes behind the back.
On the systems side I built the Dribble Dash and Dunk Champion retargeting. All Dribble Dash game characters went through that path to GLBs and animation sets. I built single-player and multiplayer retarget, render, and moviemaker pipelines for both games, plus an AR retarget with hoop animation, color variants, and optional decimation. Command-line tools ran retarget, render, and final movie. I added VFX and ball trails, camera DOF, winner logic, and the folder contracts that kept the farm from writing into the wrong place.
I also had to support scanned users, NBA stars, mascots, Superfan, and AR from the same family of tools. Shadows, grounding, scan correction, and ball behavior all failed in different ways depending on the body.
Constraints that mattered
A dunk that looks good on Vince Carter will break on a kid or a mascot if the rig and the retarget are naive.
The game needed a simple dunk language that code could drive. The video needed the extra flare. Those are not the same animation.
Basketballs, hoops, and trails are props. If they are not part of the retarget, the replay looks cheap.
What I do not claim
Jared, Regev, Tiffany, David, Twisted Mountain, and other artists animated assigned dunks and runs under review. I did not personally animate every play. I directed the animation, made key dunks myself, and owned the retargeting and personalized-video systems.
Project frames
Production stills
