MAKING THE BAND.(Company Business and Marketing)

Aerosmith avatars rock the band's Internet site

There's isn't much that the members of the legendary rock band Aerosmith haven't accomplished in the music world. For decades the Boston-based group has been playing to sold-out venues, even appearing during the half-time festivities at the 2001 Super Bowl. Recently the band received an International Award of Achievement at the American Music Awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now the members of Aerosmith are making their presence felt in the cyberworld as well.

On the group's newly redesigned Web site (www.aerosmith.com), lifelike virtual representations of the band members assume the identities of the actual musicians during scheduled interactive live chat sessions with fans. The avatars also make periodic "drop-in" appearances, increasing visitors' chances for a "star" sighting."There's a lot of real-world psychology that applies to the virtual world, like the thrill of seeing a rock star, which personalizes the experience when visiting a Web page," says Thom Kidrin, CEO of Worlds.com, the 3D Internet portal that created the site. "The one big difference is that in the cyberworld, you can interact with the band members, which is extremely difficult to do in the real world. And, although you're interacting with 3D avatars, they are very realistic in their appearance, heightening the experience."

To create the digital alter egos of these highly recognizable rockers, Worlds.com animator Odette Plavinskas, working with Geometricks in London, built 3D models of all five band members using Discreet's 3D Studio Max. The key to creating the Web characters was keeping the resolution of the model textures to a minimum without lowering the detail quality. This was done through Worlds.com's Gamma Shaper software, which compresses special bitmapped textures created in Max, thereby reducing each image to about 2K, so the Internet user can easily render it.

Because the band members--especially front man Steven Tyler--are highly recognizable, it wasn't enough for the models to vaguely resemble the rock stars; they had to look just like them. "We wanted fans to have the experience of `meeting' the band members on the site," Kidrin says. For this challenge the company collaborated with 3DMetrics, which used its 3DFlash digital imaging technology to capture the precise facial details of each band member.

The software works somewhat like a regular digital camera, only the results are in 3D. "All they had to do was look at the lens and smile," she says. "It was just like taking their pictures, but instead we got the full geometry of their faces with a single shot by flashing a patented red, blue, and green vertical line grid on the subject's face."

In a fraction of a second, 3DFlash captures both a standard two-dimensional bitmap image of the face and the underlying geometry mesh. The photograph is essentially laid on top of the 3D geometry, resulting in a completely realistic 3D model, says Jack Strange, 3DMetrics' president and CEO. "We use this process for biometric purposes so it has to be accurate--it's within two-tenths of a millimeter" he notes. "To get the same results manually would take a digital artist months." The resulting polygonal mesh is extremely dense. For this project, it ...