Experiences
Through my years of animation, keyframe is the one I have most experience in. I have done both game play and cinematics in keyframe.
I prefer to work with a realistic style, creating something to look lifelike is something I enjoy to do.
I have experience in animating with both Autodesk Maya and Blender.
The process of making the animations in Maya and Blender is only the first part, the implementation is just as important.
The implementation is where the animation I have created truly comes to life.
I have experience in implementation with both Unreal Engine 5 and Unity.
I have made different types of riggs both humanoid and quadruped. I am comfortable in my skills to create a rigg for animation and to learn how new riggs work.
The technical part of rigg creation fascinates me and is a quite fulfilling work.
I have experience with setting up a rig from scratch with Autodesk Maya and tried out the Rigify in Blender.
I have worked with motion capture and done some clean up and editing in motion builder.
I am the kind of person that tends a lot to detail. So the ability to have the groundwork done and jump straight to the clean up and polishing is right up my ally.
Would love to work more with motion capture.
I have experience in working with Motion Builder
Most recent Work
Previous Work
Patina is set in a post apocalyptic world with human gatherers trying to put the left over machines parts to good use but not all machines are powered down as they once thought.
I created the rigg for the companion and created animations for the player, the companion and the boss for this project.
Spite is about Hermod wanting to bring back his brother back to the living. Hel has Hermods brother in a deadly grasp and do not want to give him back freely.
I animated for the player character, two smaller enemies and I also rigged and animated all the animations for the elite enemy called the abomination.
Mothia, you play as a frog collecting all the fireflies that the Mothsters has released from the lighthouse.
I have animated for both the player and the enemies, I have also rigged and animated the quest giver for this project.
Damsel, a princess tired of waiting for yet another hero to fail on his rescue mission. She takes it upon herself to fight against the Necromancer holding her captive.
I worked on the Boss for this project. I created the rigg and made all the animations.
Fool's Gold is the story about a miner trying to find amazing loot in an abandoned mine. I worked both the player and some of the enemys animations for this project. I also made the intro cinematic.
This was the first time for me working on a game with a 2D design.
Long Ray Home begins it story with a captured Manta ray breaking free of his captures and then try to return back home to his parents.
This was my first game project I worked on. I got to create the rigg and animate the player character, a manta ray.
In No Rats Were Harmed you play as a lab rat trying to get to the cheese.
I worked together with a fellow classmate to create a quadraped rigg for the player character for this project. I worked on the animations for the Rat and an enemy robot.
Contact
E-Mail
[email protected]
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofiecnilsson/
CV/ Resume
Hey, I'm Sofie.
If I would describe myself in three words it would be ambitious, reliable and a jokester.
Out of the office I usually spend my time with my dog Nero (Bernese Mountain Dog), family and friends. I am a people person and Iove working in a collaborative environment with like-minded individuals.
I look for a place to put my creative mindset to good use and share my horribly good jokes! I thrive in a creative enviroment and bring a lot to the table, not only my
great collection of card and board games that is.
Thank you for taking your time to read
about me, hope you have a great day
or night.
Kind regards,

Photo taken by the talented David Hamark
All my riging experiences is rooted in Autodesk Maya. I have knowledge to create a rig from scratch but I have also delved into the rigify feature in Blender.
I have experience in working closely with technical animators, I was able to help troubleshoot issues with the rigs I worked with and how to solve them.
Also have experience in working closely with graphical designers on how to create the best flow of a character for the best movements possible. I have also worked closely with VFX artist on how some effects would work and to get the timing correct.
The good part of creating a rigg myself is to get a great understanding on how I am able to move the character. It also gives me the opportunity to add the type of functionality I want my rigg to be able to do to ease my work later when animating.


I have done a fair amount of humanoid rigs. This one was the most advanced rig I have done.
It contained ribbon spine, joint twists and a socket in both hands and the back for the bow and arrow. I added SDK to the bow and string to add some feedback when pulling the string in a way to make the work more efficiently without having to worry about animating the bow as well as the string.
I do enjoy to challenge myself to new areas. My first quadruped rig I created was a dog and it was far from perfect but it worked. My skillset has since grown significanlty and I am continuously challenging myself to improve and do better and more advanced rigs.
This rig here is a Badger from the game project I worked on called "Patina". What I wanted to be able to with this rig was to portray emotions easily. I put down a lot of energy to create a rig to be able to move in a semi stylized/ realistic way.


The most interesting rig I have created was for the elite enemy in the game project called "Spite".
It was fun to create a rigg with two different characters combined into one. I wanted to be able to have the two characters interact with each other. I put down a little extra love and care to my controllers for this rigg. I felt like the controllers gave me some inspiration to what I could to do for animations.
It was kind of the feeling I got when you put on a costume to get into a character for voice acting. When I had custom made controllers I got into the character a little more.
Feel free to look into the game project called "Spite" to see the rig in action.
There was a lot of research that went into this rig. I had to look into bird anatomy to be able to create a rig with the most birdlike feeling to the wings.
It was fun to work and create animations for this bird. I think that is what differentiates a good rig from a bad. When the rig is in any way, shape or form hindering you from doing your work I would say that something is not right with the rig.


This little dude is from the game project called "Mothia". He is the head of the Firefly café who gives the player objectives.
For this character I had to have a rig what could convey a lot of emotions through a couple of eyebrows and eyes.
It was a fun character to work with, I could really get creative in how the character moves around in his secluded area.
The Necromancer from the game project "Damsel" is not that far from a regular humanoid rig. The biggest difference was in the skinning (pun intended).
Since this character is only bones I had to test out the movement of the joints as I went along with the skinning part. Since I wanted to avoid the bones to bend into each other.

This rat is from the game project called "No Rats Were Harmed". It is a block out of the rig and character since I wanted to point out that in the early stages of animating, this is all you need to get things started.
You can save so much time in a project based on the pipeline set up in the beginning. To have a rig referenced/ linked to the scene that can be updated through out the project allows you to do tons of animations early that you later on can just polish up.


Ray from the game project "Long Ray Home" was the first rig I created from my time in The Game Assembly. It brought a smile to my face to create something so simple and fast but still did not feel like a rushed assignment.
The most challenging part of this rig was to find references of manta rays movement. Most of it was the tail and main body movement, the wings only helped it guide the way forward. They did not flap like birds as I am portraying in this video.
I have worked with key frame animations most of my time as an animator. I enjoy the job and find great joy in seeing things come to life on the screen. I feel like I am continuously evolving my way of producing animations and improving my work. Still I think there is a lot more to learn and am looking forward to advance my knowledge even further.
What I really like about animating is that there is so many different ways to create something. The mood, the environment, the interactions, etc, they all play an important part in how to create the animation I want to portray. Why I like to work with gameplay animations is because they paint the feeling of the world you play in, they set the mood for the protagonist.


I have mainly animated in Autodesk Maya but during my internship I worked with Blender. There is no program I would say I prefer to work with after working with them both.
It took a little while to get myself into Blender and learn what the functions was called since I was used to Mayas set up. But the work started to flow nicely after I got myself familiar with the functionalities and the shortcuts.
I know that it is possible to animate directly in engine, both Unity and Unreal engine, but it is nothing I have tested out yet but it is something I am interested in.
In a wrold where AI is advancing for each and every day I cannot help to sometimes feel a bit discouraged to where I will fit in.
Is my work obsolete?
But at the same time it feels motivating to prove that there is a difference when a product is created by machine or by someone who can relate to the characters, feel what they feel, know what they are going through and portray the feelings as clear through the screen so the recipient can sense the same feelings.
Feel free to take a look at any of my past game projects under "Collected Works" for some more display of keyframe/ motion capture animations I have done in the past.
The main program I have worked with for the clean up of the mocap data has been Motion Builder. I was surpriced how easy it was to get into the program. It came rather naturally to me.
I do believe that there is alot of undiscovered territory for me to tread and explore a bit more in motion builder. It excites me to learn more about it and see what more motion builder has to offer.
I have worked with xsense suit when recording the mocap data for the character jumping over a wall
I have experience in both setting up the suit, work in the suit myself and I have both been helping directing others in the suit and followed instructions when I have been in the suit.
I have visited Sharkmob studios and recorded mocap data for the game project called "Mothia". The mocap data was used for both the main character the Frog and for the enemies the Mothsters.
I have thoroughly enjoyed working with motion capture and would love to work with it more in the future.
As I mentioned earlier, I appriciate to get alot of work done and be able to put more focus on the clean up and details.


I feel a little out of my element when implementing my animations to an engine but at the same time rather intrigued. It is a lot to have in mind when connecting all the dots but at the same time so rewarding when I see the results in game.
The beauty to animate is the creative freedom, there is some rules and principles to follow but you can think outside of the box. When it comes to the implementation it is all about logic and strict rules. They sometimes feel like their opposites but when you learn how they both work it creates a nice harmony.
I have stumbled across several interesting videos through all my searches on how to implement my animations in the engine. Instead of feeling overwhelmed I get inspired to step out of my comfort zone and try more and play around a bit.
Something I have been interested to try out more is creating combos for attacks or special moves. It requires to create animations that flow nicely together aswell as implement the connections needed for the button presses to activate the animation.



"Unlock the power of an enchanted pickaxe, use it to climb, teleport and fight through a treacherous cave in an attempt to get back out"
This was the first ever project I worked on that was not only 2D but also pixel style. I animated on a 3D model and had a camera set-up to render the animations to PNGs and later converting them to DDS. There was several different design choices that made the entire process a lot more difficult than it acctually had to be but it taught me much on how to structure my workflow more efficiently.


I created tons of animations for the player character. We had a set up for the character, he gained crystals on his body through out the game, we had to adjust the animations so the crystals would be in the correct positions if he was moving to the left or the right.
There was a quick fix to just spin the character around 180 degrees for the crystals to be in the correct position. But it would also sometimes mean that there was some small fixes needed for the animation to look correct from that view.
I worked on some of the enemy and obstacles animations too. This is one example of them, this is a skeleton enemy thrashing towards the player.
I also made an animation for a gem worm popping up from the ground/ walls that also do damage to the player.
Fools Gold was one of my favorite projects to work on. I had a blast with the tea in creating everything from start to finish with this game.
It was something I looked forward to work on in the afternoons.
The biggest set back was that it was a new territory for me to thresh. I had never worked with sprite sheets before and there was a lot of work to be done.
I never felt like I had the time to really get to know the most efficient way of working with the sprite sheets since we were in dire need of getting the animations in.
I created approximately 400 sprite sheets that all needed to be adjusted or fixed in some way a couple of times. It was not the best workflow that I have ever had but it was an important lesson to learn. I was very keen to have a good pipeline set early on and tested before I start the work.

Level Design:
Anton Weibull
Jeff Persson
Urban Gustavsson
Animation:
Mischa Fridman
Sofie Nilsson
SFX and Music:
Gronnie
JoelAudio
PSOVOD
Graphics:
Frida Backman
Lukas Frej
Nelly Lindbom
Programmers:
Dino Zvonar
Jonathan Andersson
Nils Hansson
Omar Abdallah
Simon Nilsson


”Yet another hero has failed! The princess, sick of waiting, take up arms of the fallen hero. Fight your way through the evil necromancer's castle and defeat the captor to reclaim your freedom”
Once again I worked closely with a programmer, we walked through all the boss functionalities, how we wanted the boss behavior to be like and what we wanted to have animated.




There was a lot of work put into creating the rig for this character. Had to adjust the joints to be able to bend where I wanted them to without the meshes bend into each other.
The ball was connected to the rig to ease the implementation to the engine as well as getting the timing right in the animation. I am aware that there are other ways to implement the ball to the animation in the engine.
I decided to have a quick fix by connecting the Necromancer and the ball since there was more importance in creating the pipeline and have time for testing of the animations.
What I really like about animating is that there is so many different ways to create something. The mood, the environment, the interactions, etc, they all play an important part in how to create the animation I want to portray. Why I like to work with gameplay animations is because they paint the feeling of the world you play in, they set the mood for the protagonist.

This was the first time I worked on a boss, the thing I noticed was that I felt like I did nothing for this project. Since all my work was gonna be shown at the end of the game and for only a fracture of the time spent solving puzzles in the first and second part of the game.
What I learned from this project was that the work put into a project is not determined on the amount of time the animation is shown. All work is important and has a purpose.
Programmers:
Jakob Persson
Jonathan Andersson
Jonathan Disenfeldt
Kristian Svensson
Nils Hansson
Level design:
Jakob Pihl
Urban Gustavsson
Oscar Hildebrand
Sound design:
Wasin Laokhot
Music:
Filip Adolfsson
Animators:
Alisa Lundh
Sofie Nilsson
Graphic artists:
Cecilia Ålander
Jenny Hellström
Assar Wade


”Use the power of LASERS, MIND-CONTROL and HAMSTER WHEELS to get your lab-rat through a series of deathly mazes featuring a plethora of SCIENCE-TRAPS!”
This project brought out many new things for me to try out. First of all was to create a quadraped rigg the second was to animate the said quadraped rigg. It was a nice change of pace to animate an animal instead of something humanoid. First time for me to animate a robot aswell.
What I liked most about working on this project was all the creativeness that was brought out during the prepod phase.

I have worked with key frame animations most of my time as an animator. I enjoy the job and find great joy in seeing things come to life on the screen. I feel like I am continuously evolving my way of producing animations and improving my work. Still I think there is a lot more to learn and am looking forward to advance my knowledge even further.
What I really like about animating is that there is so many different ways to create something. The mood, the environment, the interactions, etc, they all play an important part in how to create the animation I want to portray. Why I like to work with gameplay animations is because they paint the feeling of the world you play in, they set the mood for the protagonist.

Animation:
Sofie Nilsson
Nathaniel Scheurer
Graphics:
Linus Arvidsson
Jenny Hellström
Ylva Oknelid
Philip Wolff
Level Design:
Victor Majorin
Anton Weibull
Programmers:
Ozzy Joelsson
Isak Morand-Holmqvist
Tim Wennerberg
Dino Zvonar
Johan Rubertsson


"A magical mantaray dash through dangers on it’s way home guided by the jellyfishes"
This was the first game project I worked on. We wanted to keep it simple since it was the first time for most of us to create a game and wanted to get accustomed to our individual roles as well as our role in the team and pipeline.
It was a good first project to dip my toes in to get a taste of the process of creating a game. I created the rigg and animations for the player, a manta ray, for this project. I also animated an obstacle in the course, an eel.

It was an interesting process to get the movement and speed correct. I wanted to have in mind that there is resistance in the water so the Ray cannot move as freely and not move too much to be to big of a distraction.
one thing I would have done differently would be to have a up and down movement in the main body. Manta rays don't usually have that movement but I think it would make sense for this game.

Animation:
Sofie Nilsson
Viktor Pennonen
Graphics:
Ylva Oknelid
Sofie Axelsson
Anna Christensen
Thea Holmdahl Arnman
Level Design:
Anton Weibull
Oliver Mathrani
Hanna Hinderson
Programmers:
Thomas Holtz
Simon Nilsson
Tim Wennerberg
Rebecka Lewin
Willian Rosengren


"Leap into battle and use your rage to battle your way through Helheim to save your brother from Hel and her undying legion"
Spite was a tough game to work on. It was one of our first games to create through our own engine. This brought a ton of challenges to all the team members, the hardest problem for me was to not have the ability to apply my own animations to the game. It was hard coded by one of the programmers.
There was a struggle behind the scenes when working on this project, there was unfortunately some parts we had to cut away to same time and effort. But it was a good experience to have to learn how to kill your darlings.


My main objective for this game was the enemies, mostly the wolf/ snake hybrid we called the Abomination. I rigged it and animated all the movements for it.
It was a cool rig to work with since I had 2 separate heads and bodies that worked differently but had to join each other in one. The snakes movements rooted in how the wolf moved mostly, it worked kind of like a tail but still had to be its own thing.
We had both crawling enemies and floating enemies. My focus was on the crawling enemies. I did some animations for the floating enemy as well but this guy was fun to work with.


This was the wolf attack, a simple scratch/ slap with the claw.
This is a scripted event about the main character and the Abomination starting to work together instead of each other.
I animated all of them apart from the smaller enemy entering the scene.

I chose to make the death scene a bit more dramatic for the Abomination since it was an elite enemy and would be a not as common interaction through the game.

Animation:
Sofie Nilsson
Mischa Fridman
Jovana Vladusic
Technical art:
Janine Wahlberg Özdemir
Tyler Thomas
Jonathan Lindberg
Sound design and Music:
David Scholander
Filip Adolfsson
Voice actor:
Karen Olrich-White
Graphics:
Jon Von Letscher
Elvira Alden
Anna Christensen
Elisabet Sarsenov
Level Design:
Gustaf Löfkvist
Jeff Persson
Programming:
Ossian Saren Gran
Kristian Svensson
Simon Nilsson
Tim Wennerberg
Kaspian Ringqvist
Johan Rubertsson


"The Firefly Café has been raided by the Mothia! As a mercenary frog; jump, roll, and spin through the seedy underbelly of the island to retrieve the fireflies"
It was fun to be working on a game with a whimsical feeling compared to the project "Spite" I had before this.
There was room for fun, stretch, squash and a stylized tone. I would still say that I prefer to work with a realistic style but it is quite nice to change it up from time to time.


This was a spin attack I made for the player character the Frog. We made as many animations as we could with motion capture and then added some extra flair to the animations with the help of keyframe animation.
I had a very talented animator in my team, Mischa Fridman, who created a rig able to attach mocap data in a Maya scene so further clean up and extra keys could be implemented.
This was a high jump charge up and jump the player could do.

The quest giver, The Twiceler, was all keyframed and rigged by me.


This is a raw mocap data before clean up.
This is a cleaned up version. everything apart from the tongue is cleaned up in Motion Builder.


This is the final version of the cleaned up walk animation.


It was great fun to work with motion capture and to clean it up with Motion Builder. It was really nice to see fast results and to get more animations done.
This is an idle animation for the enemy character, the Mothster.
Same goes with the set up for the main character the Frog. Most of all animations is motion captured for the enemy as well but some clean up had to be made in Maya. We added wings and an extra pair of arms to the character so some key frame animations needed to be added to the character.

Animation:
Sofie Nilsson
Mischa Fridman
Jovana Vladusic
Technical art:
Janine Wahlberg Özdemir
Tyler Thomas
Jonathan Lindberg
Graphics:
Jon Von Letscher
Elvira Alden
Anna Christensen
Elisabet Sarsenov
Level Design:
Gustaf Löfkvist
Jeff Persson
Programming:
Ossian Saren Gran
Kristian Svensson
Simon Nilsson
Tim Wennerberg
Kaspian Ringqvist
Johan Rubertsson


"Take a leap of faith into the depths of an abandoned factory to save your companion from deadly machines! Fight fire with fire using only your wits and a piece of scrap metal!"
Patina was the last project I worked on during my time at TGA. It was a cool project and it was the closest to a game I would love to work on in the field.
It had combat, cinematics and a big variety of characters to animate.


This was a parry animation I did for the character. I really wanted to create an animation to give a good feedback with a strong impact to immerse the player stronger to the world.
This is a great example of why it is important to playtest the game and tryout the animations me myself is implementing.
The shoulder piece is snapping at the end of the parry animation. It is an error on my side.
In the parry animation the shoulder piece is not in the same position as the idle animation when the shield is activated. After I adjusted this the snapping was gone.



This is a small idle animation for the companion in the game. It is this little rascal you are trying to retrieve when entering the big scary factory.


This is a small collection of some animations I did for the final boss in the game.
This one is when the boss wakes up from its big slumber.
This is an animation for the 2 big piston arms the boss controls. The animations is when they first comes to use.


The Boss has a big glowing red eye from which it shoots lasers from. This animations is when the boss charges up to shoot, fires the laser and goes back into idle mode.
If you successfully defeat the boss then you will be rewarded with this death scene.
This was the first segment I had of a cinematic shot for this game. Unfortunately there was not enough time for the cinematic to be able to get applied to the game and was cut out before finished.
It was really fun to work on the cinematic and would love to finish it of some day.

Animation:
Sofie Nilsson
Mischa Fridman
Jovana Vladusic
Technical art:
Janine Wahlberg Özdemir
Tyler Thomas
Jonathan Lindberg
Graphics:
Jon Von Letscher
Elvira Alden
Anna Christensen
Elisabet Sarsenov
Level Design:
Gustaf Löfkvist
Jeff Persson
Programming:
Ossian Saren Gran
Kristian Svensson
Simon Nilsson
Tim Wennerberg
Kaspian Ringqvist
Johan Rubertsson
During my internship I helped out in setting up the pipeline for the animation department. I worked closely with graphic designers and programmers.
I worked on both UI design and content creation but the main objective was animation.
I learned a lot from my time at a start up company. One of the lessons I learned was that sometimes I will get an assignment handed to me which is out of my comfort zone but it is possible with a strong team that has your back.


Rush Tactics was created from a start up company, it was one of many game ideas they had and wanted to bring to life.
The theme for the characters was to be toy soldiers. I looked into tons of reference videos of toy soldiers moving in films mostly and some games.
The game is from a semi top view angle and can bee seen from a 360 degree view. So it was of great importance that the animation looks good all around.
There was two different characters in the game, one big and yellow soldier and one smaller and blue soldier.
This is a run cycle, with Unity I was able to blend nicely with only 4 directional run cycle animations to create a fluid 8 directional movement set.


This is the blue smaller soldier with the same animations as the big yellow soldier above.
I had a set up in Blender where I could use action tracks to implement the same animation from one of the characters to the other and then clean it up to fit the character better.
Since it is a size difference between them there was some clean up neccessary.




This is the death animation for the characters. It was fun to create a toy falling apart. The rig was incredibly fun to work with and gave me a lot of creative freedom. Big shout out to Jonas Gustavsson


And this is the blue soldier version of the death animation.
There are a few more animations I made and one teaser for the game but these are the once I am available at the present moment to show.
So stay tuned for more to come!