Sierra Herlevi
Character Animator and VFX Artist
Dittori
August 2025
Part 3
I'm so excited to update you on the progress Dittori is making! To make everything easier, we removed the arms from the model and have added them as objects that can be turned off and on depending on the animation. Textures are in the works, animation is nearly finished, and soon the game will be published!
Here's what the animation looks like in action!
I had the wonderful opportunity to work on a VERY small team of three artists to help create a two-minute commercial. I was the primary animator and rigged, modeled, animated, and rendered on this project. I had the chance to use the skills I had developed on Dittori to create the rig!
One thing I was really proud of was figuring out how to build the hats and tummy icons into a slider on the rig so a single rig could be used for the whole animation process. The eye shapes, the hats, and the tummy icons can all be scrolled through using a slider and even animated if needs be (as seen with the eyes)! This rig was otherwise pretty simple, but pushed me!
The eyes are also flat objects projected onto the black screen, which involved a lot of work to get them to stay shrink wrapped while following the head control, eye control, and root control cleanly. I think they turned out nice!
QWIET Agentic AI
June and July 2025
I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity and I'm so excited to work on future projects like this! I'm finding a lot of fulfillment in small endeavors like this and Dittori. Knowing my full potential as a generalist--having done the modeling, rigging, animating, shading, and even lighting and rendering on this project--has really opened my eyes to things like making my own video game someday soon!
Stay tuned for more projects like this! If you're reading this and have any opportunities you may need some extra help with, I'm always available to help on your next project!
Art by Jun Kim
Dittori
Part 2
February 2025
Dittori got an overhaul on the design side to simplify the game! I got the responsibility of starting the character completely from scratch. I got to learn how to sculpt and was able to take the character all the way through rigging. I figured out how to add IK controls to a rig in Blender as well as how to make a nice control rig! This project has been very fun so far and stretched me a lot!
Dittori
Sept 2024
I'm working on an indie video game for a friend called Dittori! My responsibilities have included retoplogizing, rigging, and animating the character!
Art by Jun Kim
Art by Lily West
Art by Brielle Hansen
Sculpt by Lily West
I was given this sculpt of the character to retopologize. I decided to use Blender for this entire project so I could work on learning a new software!
I had never retopoligized anything before, let alone a character, so this was a fun challenge and a great learning experience!
After finalling the model, I was able to rig the character! It's been a while since I've rigged anything and I really enjoyed the process. It could be better, but at this point the project was paused to readjust the style.
Here are some of the poses I made to test out the rig! There are obviously issues but I'm proud of the work I did and everything I learned!
Bulbasaur
July 2024
I wanted to practice animating a quadraped! I used a video of my dog, Dakota, as reference!
Previs work for a project called Spelljammer!
Winter 2023
With a team, I helped bring assets from Maya into Unreal Engine 5 to create a story! I learned how to apply mocap to character rigs in Maya, import animations into Unreal 5, and use the sequencer and cameras to create a cinematic for the introduction of the story.
A very silly cinematic showcasing my Unreal Engine 5 knowledge
Fall 2022
My peers and I created assets in Maya, textured them in Substance Painter, and imported them into Unreal Engine 5 to create spooky haunted house scenes! This projects taught me how to import assets, assign textures in Unreal 5, make and use blueprints, and use the sequencer to create cinematics. It's rough, but it taught me a lot about using Unreal Engine 5!