Work on the Nalu demo began back in August 2003. Nguyen indicated that it began with nebulous “what if” queries and suggestions.

“We’d brainstorm and come up with a lot of ideas that are wholly ambitious or crazy, and then as time goes along, we’d kind of cut back and come back to the real world,” Nguyen explained. “We aim for what we can achieve, and then try to stay on track. That’s what we tried to do on the Nalu demo, and it came out beautifully.”

From that start, Donelly and Nguyen worked for a couple of months on the hair through research and development. Then the team decided that Nalu would not only have long hair, but that it would be blonde as well. “From an artistic and lighting perspective, having blonde hair is much more interesting,” Nguyen asserted.

Meanwhile, O’Clair set down a firm design plan on the look of Nalu’s surroundings: not only would she be a soft, fluid character, but she wouldn't be in a “typical aquarium.” Her world would be devoid of rocks, branches, and other “hard objects,” in favor of a more “organic” environment that would ebb and flow as smoothly in the demo’s currents as she does. Engineer Eugene d'Eon, who joined the team in January 2004, made this come true.

With a rough outline in place, the star attraction was created. O’Clair began designing her in 3ds max, then shifted to Maya for the remainder of the project. She wasn’t created entirely from scratch, though:

“It did start off as this Dawn character, so her face is kind of ‘Frankenstein-ed’ together. Her eyes and lips are the same; I changed her nose and ears. Most of her body is new, but she has all the features of Dawn—like a sister,” O’Clair said with a laugh, describing how Nalu was literally pieced together.

Beer also told how Nalu required a different approach—and created some weighty challenges—in the building of her “rigging.” In computer graphics, rigging is the detailed construction of a character’s skeleton, the binding of the skin to the skeleton and the parameters of the character’s movement. For instance, to make a realistic human character, an animator needs to make sure that the knees bend in the right direction, and with limitations on the angles to which they can bend. The fact that Nalu is part fish raised the bar in many ways.

“There was a lot of time spent on rigging because of the complexity of the underwater animation. Animating a biped or a quadruped or something that has feet fixed to the floor, it’s actually easy when you’ve got some weight to work with,” Beer stated. “This thing had to keep constant velocity—it always had to flow—and Bonnie’s requirements were that it be very organic, with fluid motions as opposed to projecting itself like a fish with a flipper, it had to flow like an eel.”