3D projects

For this project, my friends Sijb and Marijn and I wanted to make the most of our one-week break. Instead of stepping away from 3D entirely, we challenged each other to stay sharp by recreating each other's original characters in Blender, with nothing to go on but a name and a persona. No references, no concept art, just our own interpretation.

I built both characters from scratch. Sijb's character Helmet Guy, and Marijn's Frog Wizard. Each one required me to make real design decisions, translating a personality into shape, proportion, silhouette, and style entirely from imagination.

The challenge taught me that constraints are creative fuel. Working from a description alone pushed me to commit to choices rather than second-guess them, and the result was two characters that feel genuinely distinct and alive. What started as a way to stay active over the break ended up being one of the more creatively freeing projects I have done.

For this project, I built a complete character animation pipeline in Blender from scratch, centred around Pablo, an original character I designed myself. Pablo is a small, round bird-like figure with thick cartoon eyebrows, a geometric beak, a moustache, and a permanently grumpy expression. The animation is 10 seconds long: Pablo walks through a dark brick alleyway, turns to the camera, and shoots it. The screen shatters with it.

Every part of that result I built myself modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting, and a glass shattering particle effect in Blender. I then took the footage into After Effects, where I colour graded it and added a VHS overlay to give it a gritty, analog horror feeling.

The biggest challenge was UV unwrapping and texturing, which took far longer than expected and required help from classmates Sijb and Marijn. Ironically, rigging  the part I had been most nervous about, turned out to be more manageable. The moment Pablo was rigged and I posed him for the first time, he stopped feeling like a mesh and started feeling like a character. That shift was when I truly understood what rigging does creatively, not just technically. The post-production stage in After Effects was where the animation found its identity. The grain, the colour grade, the chromatic aberration, all of it gave Pablo a visual tone I had not fully planned, but that grew naturally out of the choices I made along the way.

This project taught me that finishing something, even something short, teaches you more than any tutorial ever could.

For this animation, my good friend Sijb and I set out to create something truly surreal, an experience that would pull the viewer into a dreamlike world where reality bends and flows in unexpected ways. We experimented with a fusion of animation techniques, blending traditional frame-by-frame animation, keyframe animation, 3D animation, and rigged movement into one seamless, hypnotic journey.

Over the course of two intense weeks, we poured more than 10 hours a day into this passion project, completely immersing ourselves in the creative process. We played with physics and lighting in Blender to push the boundaries of what feels real, crafting strange shapes and unpredictable motion to build a world that feels both bizarre and mesmerizing.

This project was more than just an artistic challenge, it was a test of endurance, creativity, and collaboration. Through countless iterations and problem-solving sessions, Sijb and I discovered that we work insanely well together, balancing each other’s strengths and pushing each other to new creative heights. More importantly, we grew even closer as friends, bonded by the shared experience of bringing this surreal vision to life.

For this animation, I set out to bring a simple soda can to life, making it feel dynamic and engaging. It was my first ever Blender animation, and I chose it deliberately as a low-stakes way to get comfortable with the fundamentals before moving on to anything more complex.

The project pushed me to learn keyframing, timing adjustments, and easing curves to create smooth, natural motion. I also experimented with Blender's node system for the first time, using procedural texturing to achieve realistic reflections and condensation on the surface of the can. Neither of those things came easily at first, but working through them on something simple meant I could focus on understanding the tools without the pressure of a character or a story depending on them.

My main goal is to become a character animator, and while animating a soda can is far from that, the skills underneath are the same. Timing, weight, easing, the feeling that something has mass and intention. Learning those principles on a simple object gave me a foundation I could carry directly into everything that came after. It also showed me that animation is not just about movement, it is about making something feel alive, even if that something is just a can of soda.

For The Hero Pose project, I challenged myself to build a fully realized 3D scene inspired by the world of Zelda  all within just 3 days, and as my very first 3D project ever. My focus was on creating an immersive environment with simple yet effective character models, rigged for animation.

To bring the scene to life, I designed and modeled Bill from Gravity Falls, ensuring he fit naturally within the Zelda-inspired world. To streamline the process, I used pre-existing textures, allowing me to focus on character form, style, and integration into the environment.