Project Nana

More details for this project may be provided in the future!



Info:

My brother, Tony Nguyen, and graphic designer, Adrianna Cournyer, both created the initial design for this character (named Nana) as a mascot and token girl for the Freecon conventions.

I was responsible for creating a 3D representation of Nana to use as Freecon promo material. Given the initial concept work and completed artwork on Nana, I first made an orthographic drawing and ended with a fully modeled and textured character rig. The rig can be animated, but I am working on tweaking the rig some so it will be easier to animate for future use.

In this project, I decided to go for more of a game-resolution model, so I kept the poly count relatively low and greatly economized the aesthetics vs function. The texture files were also high resolution enough to show the detail necessary, but low enough not to take up too much load or render times. The UVs do not agree with my normal maps much, but I will have to experiment with rendering this character model in an actual gaming engine. Rigging was tedious, and though I tried to keep the bone count low, it required a lot of bones to have the proper amount of control I needed in manipulating the character for multiple complex poses. Because blend shapes add on more geometry, I avoided that and opted for a bone-based facial rig--once again, lots of bones and controls made for that.