3D Animation Rube Goldbergs Contraption Model WIP

For the entire semester, our goal was to write up a situation dealing with some aspect of a Rube Goldbergs contraption. We were told to create a contraption and to use it accordingly with our scene and our 3D model, Norman, in some bizarre situation. Perhaps not too bizarre, some projects are much simpler and much "sweeter" than the one my partner Damian and I are working on currently. Not to sat that it's necessarily "inappropriate" or " dirty" but our is, to say the least "different." If anything, it will make you laugh, I promise.

Back to the project, my partner and I drew up a quick story board for what  Norman was going to do in our scene and how different objects interact with one another in a series of (in our case unfortunate) events. The machine must work and Norman must interact with it in some way, shape or form. The idea is based around the model.

We decided to take our idea to the kitchen where the opportunities for something creative and funny are endless. We spent 3-ish weeks working in Maya and in Blender to create a realistic version of a kitchen scene, after spending about a weeks worth of time researching kitchen appliances, model kitchens, both modern, traditional and contemporary, and come up with our own setting. We're still in the process of animating, and even coloring our Norman model, along with tweaking our scene for the most optimal setting. This project will be completed before the 2nd week of May, which is when it is due. The 30 second requirement will probably end up being about a minute, due to the amount of work we've been putting in.

Below are our storyboards, our concepts, and some of our work that we've gotten done so far. Norman is animated about 10 seconds into our scene, I will post more about that once we're satisfied with his movements.

3D Teapot

This project was very straight to the point, and a good start to begin understanding the fundamentals of 3D modeling and using Maya. We had 5-6 weeks to follow our beginner tutorials and create a teapot, and prepare a display for the school using our wireframes and our finished product

Xbox Sculpture WIP

From time to time I find thing that perk my curiosity, one of those things is sculpture. I don't have any other knowledge of sculpture other than the core foundation, along with hand building, wheel throwing, etc. All that basic stuff is fun and relaxing for me, but I don't know much more than that. For this project, which was created back in 2013 as my final for my first semester at UMD (as a transfer student, of course, I was a junior then), was to create a piece and add a silk screen (which we drew up designs for, and created) and implement them to our finished piece. The medium we used was red clay, silk screens, screen printer, india ink, and any sculpting aids like water, sponges, and the mass variety of different carving tools.


For not having an in-depth understanding of sculpture, creating this piece was actually one of my proudest achievements. I'm incredibly proud of this piece. I used my old Xbox (original) as a reference and measured it out to be near exact. It's not perfect, and granted it's a little too slim, but regardless, it looks almost exactly like an original xbox.

Still trying to decide on color and whether or not I should paint or spray paint the final piece, touching it up with the lime-green that's implemented in the console. But that would tamper with the silk screen aspect that's located on the very top (of Master Chief), so there are some things that I still need to work out. Before I paint this, I will take a more

Portal Illustration

This was a side project I was working on based on one of my favorite games of all time, Portal. At first the piece began with some simple concepts drawn up entirely in Illustrator. From left to right, the "personality cores" are as follows:

Anger, Intelligence, Morality, Curiosity.

After I finished the bare bones of each core, I decided I wanted to finish it off with the main artificial being of the game, Glados. All in all, this little project took about 3 hours to complete and was completed entirely in Adobe Illustrator

The finished product:

Twitch Tv "Tower Dive TV" WIP (Illustration)

Twitch TV is a live stream platform focused solely on e-sports and video gaming. Anyone who plays any sort of PC based game or watches Youtube frequently has probably seen a video or two coming from this platform. Some games that are streamed include Dota, Minecraft and League of Legends. I can't say that I'm the biggest Dota fan, granted I've never really gotten the chance to sit down and play it, but as far as League of Legends go, I am an avid fan.

My cousin is an administrator on a stream for Twitch TV and approached me with a request. For their stream, they were looking for a freelance artist to provide a new logo and banner for their page. The details are still being worked out, but I came up with a few ideas based on one general train of thought. I was given free range as to what the design would look like, but it would have to connect to the game League of Legends.

For those of you who don't know or are unfamiliar with the game, League of Legends is basically a tower defense sort of game. Teams of 5 (whether with your friends or with randomly generated allies through the server) set out to destroy the opposing team and their "base" which is more commonly known as "the Nexus" There are three lanes and a jungle, which is used for bush banks (ambushes) or general jungle farming to raise one's level. Three towers stand in each lane before the "inhibitors" which are located in the base itself, after the inhibitor is down, there are 2 more towers defending the nexus called "Nexus Towers."

Long story short, your objective is to destroy the enemy's nexus before they destroy yours.

Back the reason for the post!
Below, is my concept and the process.

The concept is based on a turret that has been aforementioned above.
Created in illustrator as a clean vector, and then popped into Photoshop for some basic coloring.

Advanced 3D modeling (The Alien)

So this project was given to us the second half of the semester in Advanced 3D modeling. We had the option to either do this, or create a realistic version of a human head of our choosing. I decided this was the best bet because not only do I like creating my own illustrations to work off of, I also got the opportunity to learn how to create full bodied figures (even though it was simpler to make it abstract) and how to stitch things together accordingly.

The concept was designed on my creative mind with a little hint of Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch." I created a figure much similar to this in the past, but decided with the final product for this project, I would simplify the design so I could work in a realistic time frame. Although we did not have to apply joints and bones to the figure, I did play around a little bit with rigging, but I digress.

The overall product was created with a mixture of traditional sketching, vector art, colored simply in photoshop for an idea and created in Maya. There are a lot of differences between the art and the final concept, but for the sake of getting the project completed in six weeks I had to come to terms with some of the things I wanted to do, but simply could not at the time. The final render can be viewed below