GiGi - GGC Mascot 2024

After a couple of months preparing this year's edition of the Gotland Game Conference, I can finally introduce you to GiGi! GGC's new 3D Mascot. My fantastic colleague & Art Director, Ray Whitcher (https://www.behance.net/raywhitcher), came up with the idea of working on a new mascot. We didn't have one to represent the 3D Artists at the university so we had to fix that!

Welcome GiGi! She was the new star of GGC 2024. A 3D character made in Autodesk Maya & Blender. Ray made some awesome concept art for me to follow and, once I got the turnarounds, I went into Maya to get the 1st pass of the character. Most of the times I use Substance Painter for texturing but this time I gave myself a little extra challenge to learn a bit more of the shading process in Blender. I got to experience how to bring that 2D feeling to a 3D character.

That was not the end of GiGi!
We needed animations for the conference's video content and social media So here came the next challenge: learn how to rig and animate in Blender after having done it only in Maya before. With a pretty simple rig I manage to bring GiGi to life and it was Ray's turn to add his 2D magic: face animations and jet pack fire.
After a good back and forth of blender files from different versions :'), we had a full robot ready to welcome everyone to the Gotland Game Conference 2024 (and I... I have the latest blender version now ).

During the conference, students present their work and compete for different awards. So as a little extra detail, we made 3D printed awards. The rig and the mesh allowed me quite a lot and by adding some props, I got great poses for the awards for Ray to print.

Big thanks to Ray Whitcher for thinking of me for this project, all his guidance and good work. I had a blast! :D