Hello, my name is Mia Bourguignon, I use she/ her pronouns, and I am from Woodstock, NY (yes, that Woodstock). I am a senior Interactive Media and Game Development major, pursuing a concentration in Technical Art. Art has always been a large part of my life, to the point where I accidentally applied to a college after googling, “How to 3D Animate,” (My parents were quite surprised when they received a call from Full Sail University asking for their, at the time, 6 year old daughter). Despite the fact that art has always had a huge place in my life, I did not actually intend to pursue art as a career. I had grown accustomed to hearing that, “you can’t succeed with art as a career; just do it on the side!” Throughout high school and early college, I followed that advice religiously, focusing only on computer science while occasionally dabbling in some art commissions when I had the time. Something was clearly missing, though.
That was when I found out about technical art: something that combined my two interests in computer science and art creation. I started working full force with pipeline development (helping to co-author a motion capture to Unreal Engine pipeline, as well as creating some others of my own), character rigging, VFX, scripting and automation in Maya, real-time motion capture into game engines, implementation of art assets, material creation and manipulation, custom shader development, programming of animation blueprints, painting skin weights, and manual retopology, to name a few. My ultimate dream is to use these skills to eventually become a technical director for a large animation or game studio. With encouragement from my mentor, I have started to create tutorials for others to follow, in hopes of getting my name out there as a skilled technical artist.
Although I consider myself to be very proficient in working with models following their creation, I am hoping to improve my skills when it comes to actually creating the models. I have not taken many dedicated modeling courses, so I hope that, with practice, I can become a more proficient character and environmental modeler.
I am grateful to have worked as a technical artist on several games at this point, most of which utilizing Unreal Engine.
My Experience is as Follows:
-Character rigger in Scoops: A Story of Samples (Unity)
-Motion Capture/ VFX artist in Clean Sweep (Unreal)
-Pipeline Development in Clean Sweep (Unreal)
-Technical Director of Chord Clash (Unreal)
-Technical Director of Shinsekai Arcade (Unreal)
-UI Designer of Roller-Ball (Python/ Pygame: Physical Game Utilizing a Screen and Robots)
In terms of other creative arts I practice, I am a member of the WPI club cheerleading team, and dance is my favorite part! In addition, I am also the step-mistress for Theta Nu Xi Multicultural Sorority, Inc.’s Alpha Lambda chapter here on WPI’s campus. As step-mistress, I teach members our national step, how to stroll, and most importantly: the history of stepping in relation to Divine 9 and Multicultural Greek letter organizations. I also enjoy singing and playing instruments!
Many games have inspired me throughout my life, especially the following:
-Ace Attorney
-Ghost Trick
-Undertale
-Project Diva
-Pokemon Gen 2 Remake (Heartgold/ Soul Silver)
-Kirby’s Return to Dreamland
-Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Royal
-A Hat in Time
Player character for Shinsekai Arcade: rigging, skinning, retargeting, texturing, hair physics, 2D blink animation (created animation and figured out how to project it onto the character), general implementation into Unreal Engine
Player Character for Chord Clash:
rigging, motion capture artist, skinning, pipeline developer
Real-Time Motion Capture (Face and Body) in Unreal Engine:
Motion capture technician, character actress
Chord Clash: Bunny-Girl
character designer, poly-painter, and rigger
2D Illustration:
Custom character design, sketching, line-art, flat colors, and shading
Digital Painting:
Concept, character design, 3 variations of sketches, color-blocking, and shading
Environmental Work in Shinsekai Arcade:
Material assignment in Maya, creation of textures in Substance painter, implementing materials in Unreal Engine, custom cell shader
Commissioned Vector Art:
Created for a WPI project center: I was given a concept from the project center director, and executed said idea to be printed on t-shirts.
Walk Cycle:
3D animation done in 3DS Max
Animation with Opposing Action:
3D animation done in 3DS Max
impressive- i love how much variety you have! the WPI vector art is super cool btw
Impressive – all the tech art is so cool! I love the rigging animation
Striking: Rigging is super hard. I find it striking how you are able to not only handle rigging but expand upon it, while also being good at so many other aspects of art and game development!
Shiny – Your art is very compelling, from your 2D commissions to your 3D animations. They’re fun to look at and obviously crafted with care.
thought-provoking – your experience with tons of different fields of tech art has me wanting to explore all of them! The motion capture stuff is especially interesting, all of it is super impressive!
Impressive – The rigging is really well done and I’m impressed with how exactly the model works with human tracking, without clipping.
Inventive! Your technical work is quite impressive, especially with how you’ve used motion capture in your projects. In addition, I’m sure that creating a brand new shader for Shinsekai Arcade took a lot of creativity and time.
inventive – it’s cool how you use motion capture and rigging to bring things to life! The motion capture pipeline sounds super impressive, I imagine that’s not easy!
Cute – your 2D illustration is super pretty!
Impressive: It looks like you really have a good grasp on motion capture and rigging. It must make animating a character in-engine a lot easier.
Colorful: I like all the colors you use in your character designs. The palettes are really pleasing and bright!
Colorful, I like the way you use color.
Realistic – your understanding of human motion and 3d space makes both your animations and 3d environment very nice to look at.
Impressive: the rigging and mocap work on Chord Chase looks wonderful.