3D Art and Animation

Blender Donut 2018/2019

Everyone loves a good Blender Donut! I made this one back in 2018 or 2019, and it was the first thing I ever created in Blender. It was fun to learn the basic 3D process, build simple shapes, and learn to create materials. This created a foundation in Blender that I still regularly use to this day. This follows the classic “Blender Donut” tutorial from when Blender 2.7 was brand new.

Glass Bong

After learning how to apply textures to glass materials in Blender, I was excited at the prospect of doing more. My bong was sitting on my desk, and I developed a new appreciation for all the assorted grunge it had accumulated over the years. I recreated the basic shapes in Blender, created materials to mimic how it looked in real life, and textured the grunge with an assortment of grunge brushes in Adobe Photoshop.

Megas XLR

What a phenomenally stupid and equally kickin’ rad show this was. There aren’t really any schematics for Megas available online, so I took a handful of reference images and modeled each part to the best of my abilities. I found low-res versions of all the decals online, and recreated them in high resolution in Adobe Illustrator before moving them to Photoshop in a texture sheet. This is still one of my favorite projects I’ve done.

Olmec — Spelunky

I love Spelunky, as do many people. The first time I defeated Olmec gave me such a rush, and discovering there was a whole area beyond the Temple got my brain spinning like nothing else, and I have a giant Spelunky tattoo on my upper arm.

When I decided I wanted to learn to sculpt, Olmec was the first thing that sprang to mind, and I like to think I did Derek Yu’s design justice.

Strong Bad’s Computer

I’m a life-long Homestar Runner fan, having discovered the site at age 10 when the most recent Strong Bad e-mail was “Japanese Cartoon.” The following week, “Dragon” went live, and I witnessed the birth of Trogdor. After working with Matt and Mike on a game jam, I decided to make this little diorama-style tribute.

Garth Regwar’s Bass Guitar

A group of my friends started a D&D campaign, and I decided to play a Bard named Garth Regwar. The campaign was set in Eberron, which is noted for its sci-fi/magic crossover setting. To that end, I decided that my bard played a Bass Guitar, and I set about designing it. After several iterations, this is what I landed on.

I liked the notion of it being a five-string bass because wide necks are cool as hell, and I designed it to be used as an arcane focus. The crystal at the top serves as the concentration of magic, and there’s a small barrel at the top that spells can be fired out of. I liked the rough gray body with shiny gold accents as an overall style, and I think the bright blue emissive bits capture the more sci-fi/magic elements pretty well. The campaign eventually stalled out, but I’m really glad I made this piece for it.

Blender Donut 2023

I like revisiting things I already know how to do. It shows me in concrete terms what I’ve learned over time, and usually I end up with something better, or at least cool and different.

There was an updated version of the Blender Donut tutorial that did some cool animation and got into the basics of Geometry Nodes to distribute particles in the background, so this ended up being a worthwhile return.

Walker Mech

This was the first step in a tutorial series on making modular vehicles, and I decided to shirk the color scheme the instructor had chosen for something mint green and aggressive. I don’t think it looks that great, personally, but that’s what experimenting is for.

Modular Vehicles

Step 2 in the above tutorial series, and it consisted of building modular parts that could be shared across a variety of vehicles, presumably for implementation in some sort of RTS-style game. These were really fun to make, and I really just love adding little emissive bits to models.

Tabattlesco Tank

I wish I could take credit for the concept or the stupid-as-hell name this thing has, but this comes from the mind of my friend Shaun, whose brand of idiocy-meets-genius I can only dream of emulating.

This tank comes from his game Spice Evaders, a game that is an absolute stroke of genius for a variety of reasons. I used some forced perspective in the modeling to make it appear longer than it is, and added extra verts to more easily texture the cartoony detailing on the edges of the frame.

QUESO

Ted and I can agree on one thing, and it’s that good queso is irreplaceable. Having moved from Texas to Maryland, the true crime that the East Coast Elite commit on a daily basis is the crime of calling it “cheese dip,” making it taste bad and getting the texture horrendously wrong. That said, anything that comes out of his mouth is inherently sinful, and I had learned that I could turn 3D models into particle systems.

CANCUN

Shortly after the freeze, it surfaced that Ted had skipped town and fucked off to Cancun. I can’t imagine what kind of public servant decides that’s a good idea, but Ted sure can, because he went and did it. I visited Cancun with my wife’s family some years later and discovered that it is, in fact, a very nice place with very kind people. I hope they were mean to Ted Cruz.

MIRACLE

If there’s one thing Ted Cruz loves, it’s himself, and I can’t imagine a better way to convey that than this video. I also just really wanted to make a GMod-style flail animation. I also wanted to continue the bird idea from the previous video, and having him lay an egg seemed like an appropriate next step.

GETAWAY

While jabbing at Ted Cruz might seem like low-hanging fruit, given his history of being hated across party lines in congress, I think it’s important to note that the vast majority of politicians are pieces of shit who do not represent the interests of people. While the majority of crabs are much cooler than Joe Biden could hope to be, I hoped to make this one a fair representation of balance across the political spectrum.