Stijn van der Plas - Animation Work 2022

Showreel Time!

Hey everyone! It's great to be back! 

Most and foremost, I would like to show you my character animation work from the past seven months! Even though I'm specialising in character animation, I still love all the other departments animation consists of. That's why I wanted to make the animated shots a bit more presentable. I've noted at the bottom of the video what my work entails.

Process

Something that was awesome to work with while animating, was exporting my animations to and rendering with Blender! Almost all my reel shots are rendered in real-time using Eevee, which is so much fun! You get to play around with how your animations look and try different stuff out in a matter of seconds. It also gives greater mobility to go back and forth between the lighting and animation phase. I got inspired to change things because of it.

The only exception to this is the shot with the creature Frank who is chasing the orb. That character was made in collaboration with 5 classmates (they are credited down below). We wanted to make our own fully digital character for a while and this year was the perfect opportunity. I'm very proud of what we were able to achieve together.

I was responsible for the Retopo, Rigging & Animation. There are two demo's down below, showcasing these departments. It was quite a challenge to get his big physique and small legs to work together nicely. A lot of shape correcting was needed to hold proper volume in the animations. But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. 

For the rigging and retopo I also did a lot of back and forth from Maya to Blender. It was great to visualize the high res displacement by using modifiers. That way the playback was still smooth, and I could see whether the deformations would hold up or not, without having to wait for a render or having to use a high res mesh on a wrap deformer.

Sculpting

Another little project I would like to share is this sculpt. Because I'm animating most of the time, I know what is easier and harder to animate. That's why I wanted to make a creature that I would never want to rig or animate.

That's how I made this beast! 

But ironically, once the sculpture was finished, I wanted to animate it very badly :)

Closing Words

Thank you so much for taking the time to look through my work. I hope you liked it! If you have any thoughs, questions or feedback, I would love to hear about it in the comments below. Cheers!

I also want to give a huge thanks to my mentors for helping to push me to achieve new heights, and the whole Frank team for their awesome work by bringing the character to life: Bo Schutte (Concept Art & Character Design), Menno Haas (Sculpting & Compositing), Ruben Brouns (Texturing, Shading, Lighting, Lookdev & Rendering), Nick de Leeuw (FX & Grooming) and Emiel van Vliet (Animation).