Realistic CG Animation

Hello everyone!

My name is Kira Steyns and I am a 3D Animation Artist with a focus on Creatures and Animals.

I am proud to present you some of my work I created the last couple of month.

This Dragon Behavior is one of my first bigger shots I created during my education at Pixl Visn for my Demoreel. It also was the first time I ever animated a Dragon so I hope you like what I created here!

I started this project by creating a basic flying cycle for the Dragon. It was a bit difficult to find the right offset for the overlapping of the wings and the whole body but in the end I am very proud of the cycle. Then I started to add animation with animation layer. I changed the fly to make every flap of wings unique. After that I baked the animation to create the landing of the Dragon.

I was also responsible for the environment, lighting and rendering but my main focus is the animation.

This is my final project I animated during The Focus Academy so maybe some of you already know this reference. But I also wanted to show you how I dealt with this exercise. I was the goal to get every detail of the reference into the animation. I analyzed the reference a lot. I just struggled a bit with the spacing between the both tigers when the little one is on the ground but I think I managed it pretty well in the end.

I worked on this animation just for two weeks. It was a challenge to finish its in the short amount of time but I am happy with the result!

I started this Quadruped Animation with blocking just some cubes. It helped a lot to get the correct position and rotation of the body and the paws. Then I concentrated on the Mom Tiger. After I finished her I also did the cub.

In the end I also created an environment and lighted the scene to make its a bit more beautiful even is I mainly concentrated on the animation.

Before I animated the Quadruped interaction I created this walk cycle to get in touch with the rig and to see what each controller does. It helped a lot to really use every controller even if it was just a bit. This leads to a more realistic look of the walk, which was my goal! I also added some face animation and tail offset with layer to make it more unique.

Even if my passion is animation all kind of animals and creatures I also learned to animate humans. In this project I focused on the face animation and lip sync. As in every project it was my goal to create a realistic look and match every detail of the reference.

For the woman I also created a basic walk cycle in the beginning to learn more about the rig. I started with the main Blockout poses: contact, passing position, high and low. Then I changed to spline and added more detail and offset the keys for the final result.

While working on these animations I learned a lot about the animation workflow. I already animated a variety of Creatures and Bipeds so I got in touch with many rigs.

After my education at Pixl Visn and The Focus Academy I learned everything I need to know and I feel ready to join the industry and support the Animation teams!

I hope you like my work and I always appreciate feedback to grow and learn even more!