HIGHLIGHT INTRO

Fast and snappy animation focusing on timing and presentation.

LOCOMOTION MOVESET

8-way directional movement,
implemented in Unreal Engine.

MOTION CAPTURE

Breakdown of the motion capture workflow in GRIM: The Gargoyle King.

CHARACTER RIGGING

Various rigs I have made!

GRIM: THE GARGOYLE KING

CITY OF DARKNESS

SPITE: THREADS OF FATE

Hello, I'm Nat! I’ve always had a passion for animation, constantly surrounding myself with animated movies and cartoony video games as I was growing up. The expressive and creative nature of both animation and video games is one of the many reasons I’m excited to pursue a career in the video game industry. I have a soft spot for cartoony, stylized animation that allows for exaggeration and visual flair, but I’m always eager to take on any animation-related challenge! ★

I have worked on eight different game projects during my time at The Game Assembly. These game projects have taught me how to work with an agile workflow while working cross-discipline within a team, also the importance of clear communication. I have learned how to adapt animations to work and flow nicely in gameplay, whilst honing my skills with the twelve animation principles. Thank you for taking the time to check out my portfolio website! ― Also, here's my CV!

SPITE: Threads of Fate

As a fallen shieldmaiden denied Valhalla, you awaken in Helheim with nothing but your hammer and fury. Fight through the undead hordes of Helheim in order to reweave your threads of fate! (...titledrop!)⸻⸻Game Project #5 & #6 during my time at The Game Assembly.
Developed with ROADKILL Interactive during 4+10 weeks, half time.

During this project I was responsible for creating animations for the boss seen at the end of the game, The Norns. Various animations made for her is an intro, combat animations and animations for transitioning between phases. She also has unique animations for each phase.What follows is some highlights of these animations which I've animated!

BOSS ANIMATIONS

The Norns intro animation.

Transitioning from phase one to two.

Transitioning from phase two to three.

BOSS RIG

I created the rig for the Norns, she has a lot of moving parts and
I had to work with a lot of FK controllers to accomodate this.For a more thorough look at her rig,
check out the RIGGING section of my site!

BASE RIG

I was also created the rigs seen in the game, which were applied to the main character as well as the basic enemy types. Read more about it HERE in the rigging section of my site!

GRIM: The Gargoyle King

As a gargoyle brought to life, embark on a crystal treasure hunt. Charge through the shattered castle and find enough supporters to become
king of the gargoyles!⸻⸻Game Project #7 during my time at The Game Assembly.
Developed with ROADKILL Interactive over a period of 14 weeks, half time.

MOTIONBUILDER → MAYA RETARGETING

During this project I was responsible for establishing the Motion capture pipeline for us animators. We wanted to make sure that animation retargeting were possible, since we wanted to make a cartoony game. That way we could use our motion capture data as a solid base, while pushing the timing and poses using retargeting.

Grim stumbles over when he stops charging, ouch!

Using Mayas HumanIK system I mapped controllers to Custom Rigs, which we used to retarget the cleaned motion capture data to the game rigs. This allowed us to bake the motion capture data to the rig, making it possible for us to animate secondary animations and tweaking poses and timing on top of it.

So to summarize, we did our initial cleanup in Motionbuilder and later brought the date into Maya for polish and to animate secondary animations seen in the wings, etc.Here is another animation I cleaned with this method, here Grim "collects" another gargoyle (it's a collectathon after all!), bringing them to life!

The animation for the NPC gargoyle was made by Leo Jansson.

Some animations were cleaned using the mo-cap pipeline above, and some were completely keyframed.I really enjoyed pushing and exaggerating movements in order to convey Grim's goofy personality and sillyness!

Mo-Cap+Retarget, Crystal Power Attack

RAW vs CLEAN. (Achooo―!)

Keyframe, Player Death

Crumbling simulation by Åke Sjögren

GRIM RIG

I rigged the main character for this game, the gargoyle king himself!
For more info, check out his rig HERE in the rigging section.

AAAH ⸺ THE FURNITURE LIVES!

I also rigged and animated one of the enemies seen in the game, a bookshelf brought to life by magic! I created a controller that allowed me to easily tilt the bookshelf on its edges by using pivot groups and limit information. You can twist and squash the bookshelf in order to create some really cartoony stuff, and there are controllers that moves the books around. It was really fun animating the books moving around inside the bookshelf itself!Below are some highlights of the animations I made for the bookshelf.

Idle

Attack

Celebrate

We had the wonderful opportunity to record out motion capture data at Sharkmob's motion-capture studio for this project! ★Bonus behind the scenes photo of our recording session, here I am in the suit recording an early version of Grim's charge ability! Leo can't contain me!!

CITY OF DARKNESS

A blind monster prowls the abandoned city, standing between you and your freedom. Can you sneak silently enough to escape?-- UNDER CONSTRUCTION --⸻⸻Game Project #8 during my time at The Game Assembly.
Developed with ROADKILL Interactive over a period of 10 weeks, full time.

"THE UNIDENTIFIED"

During this project I was responsible for rigging the player character. Since City of Darkness is a first person game, this meant researching and setting up a whole new pipeline together with the programmers, as we've never done a first person project before.In order to save on time and resources we decided to only rig arms for the player. The player is unnamed and silent, as it adds a bit of mystery.

CHALLENGES

The biggest challenge for this project was establishing how us animators and programmers would implement the player character in the game.The programmers needed to implement a first person camera which they could pivot and rotate depending on player input, but us animators also needed the functionality to be able to animate the camera during certain animations.We solved this issue by having different types of joints in the rig for different purposes. The programmers could use one joint for the in-game camera, another joint could be used by us animators to animate the camera for those specific animations that required extra camera movement.

PLAYER RIG

The player rig contains various controllers and systems, an overview of it will be available on the RIGGING section of my site soon!

Arm Mesh and textures made by Hedvig Karlsson
Prop Meshes & Textures by Emil Nilsson

Wake Up

Charging the Lamp

Aiming the Gun, Idle while aiming, Stop aiming

THE IDEA AND GOAL

For this project I animated and implemented an 8-directional moveset in Unreal Engine, I drew inspiration from the game DEADLOCK by Valve.The goal was to practise implementing animations into an engine whilst making them feel fluid and nice to play with.Special thanks to Axel Franzén for general coding advice and help!

Kunoichi Rig by Kiel Figgins, Model by Matthew Casillan, Concept by Mortiz Cremer.

State Machine

The statemachine used for this project! Most of the magic happens inside the Locomotion BlendSpace, I tweaked all the blends in here!

8-DIRECTIONAL

The locomotion blendspace contains eight different runcycles for each direction and seamlessly blends between them depending on input.

DASH BLUEPRINTS: CAMERA

The following project uses "Camera Controller Desired Rotations" for it's third-person camera. This means that the player character will orient in the direction of the controller input, in this case making the camera always being behind the characters back.This was a problem with the Dash animation, as I wanted it to work in any direction. Instead of animating eight different dash animations in each direction, I opted to instead disable the fixed camera during
this particular animation.

DASH BLUEPRINTS: CURVE MODIFIER

A Dash Speed Curve modifier was created in order to tweak the speed and timing of the dash. This allowed me to customise the it in order to feel good and flow nicely in gameplay.

Bonus behind the scenes video of me recording a reference for the runStop animation, I had to adjust the timing a bit but this is it! :^)

Kunoichi Rig by Kiel Figgins,
Model by Matthew Casillan,
Concept by Mortiz Cremer.

Stylized Eastern Village by Aleksandr Ivanov

BENEDICT

THE NORNS

GRIM

"UNIDENTIFIED"

BASE RIG

BENEDICT

An original character of mine who is an eggyolk! They're a bit aloof and lazy. Benedict likes energy drinks and the
colour green.I designed, sculpted, retopologized,
rigged and weightpainted them myself!

FACE RIG

Eye rig & SDK's for eyelids,eyebrow controllers w/ SDK's,various SDK's for expressions,mouthbag with jaw controller,multiple controllers for "hair".

IK SPINE

Allows for stretchy-ness, a must for any cartoony character!

AND MORE!!

The rig also contains other features such as IK/FK Switch systems
and SDK's for the fingers, among other things!

THE NORNS

The boss you face at the end of
SPITE: Threads of Fate.The goal was to create a creepy and unnerving boss, we decided to go with
many limbs and faces (one for each phase)!

Model and textures made by Christopher Blom.

SPACE SWITCHES

Her scissor blades uses space switches, which allows for seamless switching between locations. This was a necessity as I wanted her
to be able to grab her swords at specific times.

FACE YOUR FEARS!

The Norns swap faces during each phase of the bossfight, terrifying! ...and a bit gross!

GRIM

The gargoyle king himself! A statue brought to life, the player character and protagonist of GRIM: The Gargoyle King. Grim is a bit silly and clumsy, not that surprising considering that he was brought to life like 5 minutes ago!

Model and textures made by Hedvig Karlsson

IK SPINE

Streeeeeeeeetch...

FOOT HEEL-BALL-TOE RIG

SDK's for rolling the foot from it's heel to it's toe, rolling on the ball of the foot and banking the foot left to right! This is super convenient for run cycles!

WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Grim has IK/FK switch systems for arms and legs, and there's also
controllers to move his horns, fangs and the corners of his mouth, SMILE!

"UNIDENTIFIED"

Waking up in a city that is about to be demolished must be an absolute nightmare, this is precisely what happens to the protagonist in City of Darkness... Oh, and they're also being chansed by a relentless monster.-- UNDER CONSTRUCTION --

Model and textures made by Hedvig Karlsson
Prop Meshes & Textures by Emil Nilsson

ARMED AND READY

The protagonist wields a gun and a wind-up lamp. It felt natural to use space switches for these props as it allowed us to have full control over when we wanted to show the props depending on animation.These space switches places the props either in the corresponding hand or in the world space, in this case hidden away underneath the floor.

GUN RIG

The Gun rig constains various controllers to manipulate the handle, barrel, slide, hammer and trigger, as well as the bullets which are parented to the barrel of the gun.

LAMP RIG

The Lamp rig constains various controllers to manipulate the handle and key.I also added a space switch that constrains the players right hand to the key, this made the LampCharge animation that much easier to animate!

BASE RIG

During the beginning of the 5th game project at The Game Assembly I created a Base Rig which I shared with my class and the other groups, that way they could easily modify and apply it to their own characters!

The model mesh was provided by TGA.
Shieldmaiden model & texture by Christoper Blom.

MODIFY AND CUSTOMIZE!

This is a standard IK/FK rig with a stretchy IK Spine and a Heel-Ball-Toe setup for the feet. A perfect base to use as is or to build upon!We used the base rig for the main character in SPITE: Threads of Fate, (and for all the enemies). We saved lots of time doing this, and could simply add desired features on top of the base rig. In this case we added a joints for her hammer.

I started by blocking out the overall timing...After some feedback I decided to
further speed up her descent as she falls.

After I was satisfied with the timing I began blocking out the camera and its movement, I wanted the camera to imitate a handheld one. I recieved the feedback that the camera were tracking her too perfectly, the tracking was slowed down in order to make it imperfect.

Added a scene,
skydome and
some lights...

Final version after feedback and polish!I decided to hold her pose a bit longer in the end by having her look over into the camera, giving the viewer some more time to 'digest' and process the animation before cutting it off.

Shinobi Rig by Christoph Schoch,
Character Design by Servane Altermatt.

Grandmas House Diorama by Matteo Tillmann.
Japanese house by Kaja Rossler.