Britney's Dance Beat

Britney's Dance Beat: Modeling

The nice thing about modeling Britney was the endless volume of reference material available on the internet. Britney is perhaps the most sought after celebrity on the web. Naturally, there was not a problem finding reference photos. I was given additional materials by THQ, including more photo reference and some data from a cyberscan that had been used to build some in-game likenesses of Britney. The cyberscan data looked, let's just say, un-flattering. The conditions for the scan appeared to have been less than ideal. In spite of this, I found the data useful as a template for joint placement and proportions in a general sense. Anyone who builds models for animation production knows that when using cyberscan data, the data itself is not very useful for much more than reference.

One thing about celebrities, and especially female celebrities, is that their image or persona constantly evolves. Britney is no different. Things like her skin tones and proportions fluctuate with conditions like diet, level of stress and fatigue. Add to that calculated changes like costume and make-up design, and the possible directions the specific look of the character could have taken were quite varied. Much of this was answered for us by THQ and Britney's management. Britney's make-up and hair needed to reflect the current look projected by the latest CD release and tour. As far as how to deal with her body proportions I naturally felt the best course was to choose the most ideal representation that the reference could justify. In her most recent videos Britney appears very slender and thin, so the model I built reflects that image, rather than merely being composite of all of the reference.

The models for Britney's body and face were created in Mirai, using box-modeling techniques and some assets I had previously built for other Rainbow projects. The Britney models had a dual purpose. They had to be used for creating the animations for the game itself, and also for creating additional still image illustrations for marketing and other print materials, such as the game guide, posters, ads, desktop wallpapers, etc.. During the modeling process, the design for Britney's outfit was changed twice, with the final jumpsuit design being the third costume model I built. The finished model is 32k polygons.

One feature of a successful character model is that the likeness of the character is evident before any textures and surfaces are applied. Looking back, I notice several things that could be better about the model. But even so, Britney's likeness is evident in digital sculpture. When the model sheets were reviewed by Britney's management, they had a few changes, so I made a round of revisions. Once her manager felt the model was ready, I proceeded with creating her hair and make-up.

Hair

Britney's CG hair was built using Shag:Hair. Around two-hundred splines were used as model hairs. At the time, Britney was sporting a long full hairstyle. This was not a problem for creating illustrations, but for creating animation, this proved to be by far the most difficult since so much of the hair had to collide with her neck, and upper body while she twisted and turned during the animation. A couple of pigtails would have been a lot easier. Realistic hair motion of long hair is created using a particle simulation. We used a combination of two simulators to create the hair motion for the project: Simcloth and Shag:Hair's built-in dynamics engine. As it turned out, the biggest problem we faced was getting the hair to maintain volume during the simulation. As you can see from the clips, that was still a problem for us. In order to achieve clean simulation results, the hair particles that interacted most with Britney's other geometry needed to be free of tension and forces which would help maintain volume and body. We were forced to choose between clean simulations and hair with body, but collided and punched through her geometry.

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