3D animation

During my 3D animation study at HKU and during my free time I love to model, sculpt, animate and learn more about animation. On this page you'll find animations I made using Blender.

During the third period of my 3D animation study at HKU I started working with a humanoid rig. The rig I used is called Bony and is free to use for everyone who wants it. I like rigging but we weren't allowed to rig a character ourselves for this assignment. During this course we got to rotoscope four different kinds of movements or types of footage. I really liked the assignment and I felt I had more to learn from it so I decided to do some of the assignments twice or longer than what was really necessary.

For the first exercise we were to rotoscope a 12 frame walkcycle with the images of Eadweard Muybridge as reference material. I was curious to see if there we a very noticeable difference between a man en woman walking, that's why I decided to rotoscope both. For the second exercise we had to rotoscope a jump, still making use of the Muybridge images. At first glance I thought that the first jump I wanted to rotoscope would be really easy and so I wanted to do a second more difficult one. In the end the first jump was actually much more difficult than the second one. This was, in hindsight, because the movements in the second one were much more exaggerated and more easily visible than the first one. This was a very interesting lesson to experience. For the third exercise we got to rotoscope live action footage. It was actually quite a challenge to find live action footage without a moving camera, until then I never really took notice of how much a camera moves around. In the end I decided upon a small part of a fight sequence. Here I ran into Bony's rig limits. It was very difficult to mimic Bruce Lees movements using Bony but I think I did alright. We only had to rotoscope 12 frames but I really wanted to finish the swipe so I rotoscoped the whole movement (which was 24 frames). And for the last exercise we got to choose what type of footage we wanted to use, we could choose between 2D/3D animation, an insect or an animal. I always really liked the cartoon Avatar, Toph was/is my favourite character, so I decided that this would be my final rotoscope. I think I got the movement alright but I had a lot of trouble aligning the camera properly.

During this whole assignment I got a better grasp of how the human body works, with it's counterbalancing between the hips and shoulders, how the human body is never (never!) still, how it's never really symmetrical and how to shift weight and balance. I've said it before but I really enjoyed this assignment and I learned a lot from it. The music in the video is: Ghost Fight (UNDERTALE) Jazz Cover.

HKU school project - Cube Christmas

This project is the final project for the second period of my 3D animation study at HKU. This was a real treat to make! We had complete freedom regarding what we wanted to do so long as it was Christmas themed and the video shouldn't be too long. I'm not much of a Christmas person myself but that's actually why I wanted to give these cube guys a nice Christmas experience.

First I started with writing down some ideas and the story came together pretty quickly. I wanted it to be a propper three act story structure with an "all's well that ends well" ending, a little cheesy maybe but it suits the Christmas theme in my opinion. Once I finished writing the story I stared on scribbling down the storyboard. Before this project I had very little experience with digital drawing it was an extra bonus I got to put some time in on Krita (the program I use for digital drawing). I recorded my own voice as voice-over for the characters, this was pretty scary for me but in the end I had a lot of fun doing it, and I collected all the necessary sound effects off the internet. I put everything together as an animatic using Premiere Pro.

Before I started animating I asked my classmates and my teacher for some feedback to improve on the storytelling. Once I implemented the feedback I stared on creating the world and modelling al the objects. Since the main characters were just plain old cubes I decided to keep the environment as simple as possible regarding both shape and colour. I've always enjoyed a low poly look so I was happy to be able to use it once more in my latest animation.

After I finished creating the environment I saved the file with three separate names for the three separate scenes I had decided on. I also created a fourth file where I used a particle system to populate the mountain slope with pine trees. It was easier for me to animate the scene where the parent cube comes rushing down the mountain on top of the tree that way. With all the scenes in separate files I added in the lights and camera's and I blocked out the general animation. After some testing and re-blocking I started animating.

I've come to really enjoy character animation over these past few months and I was really glad I could put all the lessons I had learned in the previous exercises to good use in this animation.

When all the animations were done I rendered the shots , re-recorded the voice-over where needed and compiled the along with the music and sound effects using Premiere Pro. While I was working on the audio I learned a lot about the timing of a sound. I created this animation using Blender 3.00 and it's rendered using EEVEE.

Storyboard & Animatic

Process

Models

Impression shots

HKU school assignment - Walkcycle exercises

During the second period of my 3D animation study at HKU I finally got to work more in actual 3D animation. Our first assignment was to create a convincing walkcycle using a cube. While the exercise seems pretty simple I found it actually holds a lot of valuable lessons. While making these walkcycle animations I started to get a better feel for some of the animation principles like Timing, Squash and Stretch and Exaggeration.

I also learned a lot about the weight of a character and how/where to displace it to when moving. I learned this partially by observing reference materials but mostly by acting the action out myself. Which is also something I never used to do but I found that it's a very helpful tool to make an animation more lifelike.

There was a lot of freedom regarding the type of walkcycle we were required to create. That's why I decided to make multiple different ones instead of just focusing on just one regular walkcycle, making sure to challenge myself with each new animation. I had a lot of fun acting out these animations and of course also while creating them!

HKU school assignment - Lipsync

During the second period of my 3D animation study at HKU we got the assignment to make a short lipsync animation. At first I tried another version of motion capture (like I did with the Poem animation a bit further down this page) but I wanted to challenge myself a bit more and decided to do another lipsync animation. This time I decided to use BlendShapes.

Since I had only used facial BlendShapes once before, in one of the Eel animations I made for Virual Play (also a bit further down this page), it was a pretty new and really fun experience. I learned a lot about the shapes our faces and mouths make when speaking, I hadn't given it much thought before this assignment.

Later, while working on the animation, I discovered that the style I had used to make the Blendshapes (big en wide gestures) didn't really suit the type of audio I was using. So I adjusted the shapes a little to make them a little more realistic, this was a lesson I did not expect to learn but a very valuable one nonetheless. It's definitely something I will be paying closer attention to in the future.

For this assignment I decided to focus my attention on the animation rather that the modelling. So I used models I could find online to create a character that slightly resembled the character in the scene from the audio fragment.

Once I finished the lipsync I rendered the shot and compiled the along with the audio, the audio you're hearing is a fragment from WestWorld season 1 episode 10. I created this animation using Blender 3.0 and it's rendered using EEVEE.

Process

Blendshapes

HKU school project - 14 second animation

For one of the first animation assignment for my current study, 3D animation at HKU, I made the animation you can see above. It was a class assignment and the full result can be found here. We choose a song, 19-2000 by Gorillaz (Soulchild Remix), and we dividend the parts amongst the class. The theme was "vacation" and since I used to love skateboarding during the summer holidays this seemed like a really fun idea to use in this animation assignment.

It was a really fun assignment and I really loved working on it. I learned to work with new shaders to give it that 2D neon look and I also dove a little further into the lighting settings for the 3D animation shot.

I had a lot of freedom regarding the content and style of the animation. I decided to go with a low poly style, to give it that "easy going" feeling that the character should have during his vacation. I started with writing a short script for the animation and after that I drew the storyboard, which you can find that below, and made an animatic. I also started on the modelling, texturing, rigging and weight painting of the character (I named him Guy) and the skateboard.

Once the character was done I started on his poses for the animation and later on I started working on the actual animation. And I created BlendShapes for the shirts so it won't clip through the legs and it'll move up when the character jumps. I also created the rest of the models, the trees, texts, grass, stones etc.

The first and third shots I animated in 3D first, later I added a shader which shades the whole model black, adds a solidify modifier and shades these extra faces in a selected color. But since there are no lights in these shots everything is flat and looks 2D. For the character I also animated the colors, to make the scene look move vibrant and in action.

Once all the animations were done I rendered the shots and compiled the along with the music. I created this animation using Blender 2.93 and it's rendered using EEVEE.

Storyboard

Process

Models

Impression shots

Hatchball in game animations - Electric eel

Above you'll find some of the animations I made during my internship at Virtual Play. These will be used in the game they are currently developing; Hatchball.

Hatchball is a combination of the classical game Pinball and 3D Tamagotchi. During the game the player can collect eggs for Hatchlings (the animals in Hatchball) which the player can hatch later on in a hatchery. Once hatched the animals will help the player during the pinball part of the game.

For this game a great deal of animals (Hatchlings) had to be created and animated and so I did most of the animations for the Electric Eel.

For the Eel it was very important that the animations stayed as close to the real thing as possible while it should also be cute and cuddly. Of course this wasn't an easy task since a real eel isn't particularly cute or cuddly and of course it also doesn't show any actual facial expressions. So for Sad Animation facial expressions I used Pixar movies as inspiration and pushed the expression further. While the Love and Eat animations are kept closer to reality, for these I studied videos of electric eels and moray eels.

Since the eel is a very smooth and flexible animal I took extra care so that all its movements are also be very smooth, round, flexible and effortless.

The eyes and eyelids aren't animated in most of the videos above because these will be animated through code in the game.

I made these animations using Blender 2.9 and they're rendered using EEVEE.

Process

Model

The model and texture were made by a number of other interns, under the guidance of the art director of Virtual Play.

Impression shots

DigiShi

During my internship at Virtual Play I was asked by a different company, Remark, to create assets for his new game DigiShi. This was of course an awesome opportunity and it is also how I decided to create my own studio, Fancy Fox Studios.

The first step of course was to have a meeting and discuss what the customer was actually looking for. DigiShi is a VR game for the Oculus Quest where the player can program his sheep, using cards, to get to the other side of the gameboard while also learning more about sheep by answering questions. At first the customer wasn't sure about the style he was looking for. He did know he wanted the sheep te be programmable, which means that they should have some mechanical detailing. I provided him some moodboards and in the end we settled on a low poly style, this is nice since the poly count won't be too high so the Oculus won't have any trouble running the game and it's a very child friendly style (young players are his main target audience).

Once we settled on a style I started drawing the characters and later modeled them along with all the environmental assets. I had a lot of freedom regarding the animations. The customer knew which animations he wanted but he wasn't sure on how they should actually look. So I drew storyboards for the animations, which the customer liked very much. For the animations I wanted to make sure they were comical and theatrical. Like the Wolf bending extra low when sneaking forward or the Sheep jumping sideways in a very theatrical manner. I decided on these exaggerated animations because of the style we landed on but mostly because they should be fun to look at for the targeted audience.

Once all the models were rigged and weight painted I started animating them using the storyboard. All these individual animation can be found below.

I made these animations using Blender 2.9 and they're rendered using EEVEE.

Process

In game animations - Sheep

In game animations - Wolf

In game animation - Mole

Models

Impression shots

Aryzon World Bèta introduction animation

As my final project for the extra Animation course I took during my current studies, I was required to make a 30 second animation. I set out to look for a company that could use such an animation and I found Aryzon. Aryzon wanted an introduction animation to their new product, Aryzon World. They asked me if I could help them come up with a concept to show how useful their product could be in the educational sector. So I did some research and found out that most teacher have a hard time teaching because there is no interaction with their students. With this in mind I wrote up a concept and made some sketches. After a brainstorm session with the Aryzon team a few adjustments were made to the initial concept and so the final script and storyboard were created.

For this animation I decided to go with a low poly look. It is what appealed most to the customer and it is what was best suited for the timeframe I had to finish this exam project. Since the modelling would be low poly, the colors and materials would also have to be basic to give the whole scene the same look and feel.

For the first scene I created a dark, glum and empty looking classroom to better represent how it sad and demotivating it is for him to teach with no one present. The second scene is the complete opposite. The classroom is bright, with happy colors and the schooldesks are placed in rows instead of 1,5m apart from each other. The classroom is also full of animated 3D headset representing students. The third scene was somewhere in the middle of the first two. Since the teacher was still in the empty classroom, it shouldn't look too bright and joyous but the teacher is happy to use the product and he is happy to teach digitally. So the lighting and colors are a bit brighter.

I made this animation using Blender 2.9 and it's rendered using EEVEE.

Storyboard

Process

Models

Impression shots

Facial motion capture - Magic Mirror

As an assignment for my extra Animation course during my current studies, I was required to animate a poem and make a lipsync animation. For this assignment I choose to animate a poem from Revolting Rhymes written by Roald Dahl. I decided to go with facial motion capture because it is the best way to animate lip synchronisation and I'm very interested in facial motion capture. I was inspired by the Magic Mirror from Snow White and Shrek. I made this animation using Blender 2.83 and FaceGen Modeller, it's rendered using EEVEE.

Process

Models

Test animations - Sn-can

For this project I wanted to get some more hard surface modelling experience and rigging experience with non human rigs and I wanted to do some different animation exercises. I'm a big Star Wars fan and I was inspired by the AT-ST when I modeled Sn-can. The colors are inspired by The Slave I from Star Wars. I only rigged the legs to be able to move, the top is a separate object so it can be rotated on it's own more easily. I ran into some problems involving vertex groups which I fixed with weight painting. I made these animations using Blender 2.83. They are rendered using EEVEE.

Process

Model

Animation project - Car crash!

For this project I really wanted to get some more experience in hardsurface modeling, storytelling, light and camera work and animation. I also really like low poly styles so I decided to expand my knowledge on that as well. While making a car is fun, I wanted to give it a little twist. So instead of wheels this car has thrusters. And instead of a smooth ride this car crashes at the end. I wanted to use this animation as an introduction to this character.

Using rock formations, trees and bushes, in different sizes and rotations, I was able to create an interesting background with a lot of variety. Using volumetric lighting I was able to creat a purple mist which gave the scene much more depth and made it look more interesting. I also wanted my animation to take place at night and I was able to accomplish that scene setting as well through volumetric lighting.

I made this animation using Blender 2.83. No sound yet but I will be adding some in the future.

Process

Models

Impression shots

Animation project - Restart

I felt there was a bigger story to be told after I finished my "Car Crash" animation so I started searching for ways to expand on it. I wanted more characters and an actual story to be told. That is why I came up with this new animation. It's about the old car, on it's way to it's last destination. Along the way the runs into some younger cars, also on their way in and in a big hurry, and crashes. The younger cars feel really bad and take him to a service station to have all the damages fixed. The next day the two younger cars wake up to the sound of honking. The oldtimer is totally fixed and as good as new, ready for an adventure. And so the trio ride off to greet the sunrise.

For this project I wanted work more on my low poly style and get more experience in animation, modelling and storytelling.

Storyboard

Process

All new models

Impression shots

Logo animations

Below you'll find some logo animations I did for OpenUp Technologies.

For my internship, and for one of my extra courses, they asked me to make some animations for their logo. While this logo is 2D I animated it in 3D. The company where I did one of my internships was looking for some logo animations for their website and as a loading screen icon for their product. After a brainstorming session with the creative team we decided I should animate a few of the ideas and make some variations of those ideas. I also made some sketches which I could use throughout this project. These animation were made using Blender 2.9 and they were redered using EEVEE.

Process

Other