3D Animator
Fixed term contract at University of Liverpool's Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC)
From February 2024 to August 2025, I had the honour to work in University of Liverpool's Virtual Engineering Centre, VEC, as the sole 3D Animator in the Visualisation Team.
During my time there, I was able to grow my existing skills in Autodesk's Maya, to also include optimisation to transfer into a game engine, which in this case was Unity.
I was brought in specifically for a collaboration project between Dog Trust and the University of Liverpool, which required the revamp and compilation of two separate but similar projects, which at the time were running for 5 years in total. The clients also requested new functionality, and everything had to be completed within a year and a half. Hence, I had to carefully and calculatedly allocate time for revamp modelling, rigging, animating and exporting from Autodesk Maya to a game engine new to me.
As the sole 3D Animator on the team, I had the responsibility of not only completing my tasks as an animator, but also organising and managing time to fit the project’s timeline, attending meetings with clients and accommodating client needs and requirements, in relation to the project in hand.
Production wise, I expanded my existing skills on modelling, rigging and animating, as well as using the PyMel script editor for the first time, to help find inconsistencies on geometry and joints. Through Chat-GPT I was able to create scripts, and slowly I started understanding the mechanics of the coding language to find any of the mistakes the AI made on the script along the way.
Below are readily available 3D model viewers, allowing a closer look of the dog while some of the main animation loops are playing, along side with a longer form video further below showcasing a wider range of the project's functionality as a whole.