William Buerkel:

3D Generalist & Animator |
Freelance Owner of Polar Desert Studios | Life long gamer | Husband, soon to be father :)

My expertise spans across 9 years of 3D animation, product rendering, motion design, video editing, VFX compositing, and overseeing projects from initial concept through to the final deliverable. I bring a passion for crafting innovative, high-quality work and have a deep enthusiasm for both the technical and creative aspects of visual storytelling.

3D Generalist Reel ⤵️

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But what about 3D, for games?

How does one showcase the vast knowledge base of 3D at once?

With Game Engines like Unreal!

May I present my actual portfolio piece… KNIGHTS N LAIRS

An arcade style, hack & slash, rouge-lite loop dungeon
Features:
100% custom animation.
I’ve utilized a mix of keyframe animation for enemies and player animations, and custom MoCap through MOVE.AI and Cascadeur for third-person views of the animations.

Complete usage of Blueprints
The whole game has been built utilizing Unreal’s Blueprint visual scripting that I learned over the course of a year and a half.

Visual style that recalls the likes of Quake 3 & Rune

I wanted the visuals to be appealing with modern aspects, but also retro-nostalgic using small texture sizes, no normal maps, and highly reflective metals using cube maps.