This is the very first 3D assignment I worked on during class. I spent half of the time tinkering with shaders, lighting, and position. I messed around with the UV shells for the very first time too, way before I was actually supposed to use them.
Frankly I think that was a good thing. I tended to teach myself

This was my second assignment. We were individually tasked with making a neighborhood. I do still find this scene kind of cute. I enjoy the atmosphere even when my skills grew in terms of landscape building and it really allows me to reflect on my progress in only a few MONTHS. That's crazy to me.

This was also the first time I discovered models were hollow. (lol) I didn't know about normals yet, so I tried to color the inside. That didn't work, but I still found a loophole to make 3d looking windows and it's the same method I used on my Chicagopolis build, which is one I am STILL extremely proud of.

Chicagopolis was born during my third class assignment. The prompt was to map and create a town, and I took very heavy insiration to Problem Sleuth at the time, so I decided to make my city stylized and cartoonish. It was ambitious, but we were all given creative freedom, so I thought it would be easy.

It wasn't easy, actually. Considering how long large models take to construct, and considering how obsessed with appearances I had been, it took a little over the due date to complete, and Maya crashed so many times that I can't count them on my two hands. I had never used the Arnold Render AiToon shader before, and I didn't know how to use UV maps yet, but I did a bit of tinkering and I'm extremely happy it came out the way it did.

The video above was my rocket assignment. I followed a tutorial that everyone had to watch, and I made a simple scene with a following camera so I wouldn't have to make everything super close or super tiny. I think I was the only one in the class to use a camera in that way, but I'm still somewhat kicking myself for making a scene so bland. I saw other students make toast planets and whatnot, but I know if I did something like that, then I'd never get it done in time. This also marked the very first time I had utilized deforms and the Hypershade window, so I was struggling with that enough as-is.
The video was rendered via playblast with NURBS curves disabled from view.

I enjoyed this one a lot.
I gave a pre-built flour sack rig some emotion! We had to draft it out first, making sketches on what we could start with. The beginning was simple posing until we had to animate it and make it dance. We were told to make an animatic, but I got so excited that I fully animated a gif of the flour sack dancing. That took up a lot of my time, which is why my flour sack animation is pretty shoddy, but it isn't even that bad looking if I do say so myself.