Selected Classwork

This page is out of sequence by course number and origin. It was actually done at City College. But I dicided to collect all of my specifically 3D-related classwork into one group. Most of such work was done for courses taken at Santa Monica College.

In pursuit of my ongoing hobby of book design, back around 2013 I took Art 634: Introduction to 3D Graphics. Which translated to learning (or rather, scratching the surface of learning) Maya. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I turn out to be rather good at 3D modeling — for a beginner, anyway. I’d been no use whatsoever at modeling clay (in analog) back in High School.

The whole reason for trying to learn modeling, of course, is that the 3D program that I use for building the illustrations for my publication projects will let me build a scene and render it, but since it is not a modeling program, I am limited to using whatever commercial models are already available. Not everything that one needs for a given project is. Sometimes one can commission something, and there are a number of volunteers in the various 3D forums who are usually willing to help in the case of building props. But I was reaching a point that it made sense to at least try to see whether I might be able to address the problem on my own.

Further info can be found under the Miscellany heading related to the Saga of the Sawhorse.

One semester isn't enough time to get anywhere close to learning all of the things that one needs to know in order to produce a working model of anything. The course really needed to be two semesters, rather than one (for the record, as of 2021 the course is now two semesters). The book that we were using as a textbook started us off with some architectural modeling. And then we went on to doing the bouncing ball (Maya is widely used by animators) and finally it walked us through building an Alien.

So here is my Alien. I have no earthly use for an Alien, but at least I managed to get a silly illo out of it.

There turned out to be some problems with the model since Maya (which in that particular version was an evil, buggy program) had turned some of the polygons inside out. I ended up postworking the hell out of it. But forced it into submission, finally.