This one was definitely created after I graduated, but I believe it reused a model I created for a looping animation I made in art school. It felt particularly detailed (at the time…), and the movements were pretty fun to watch.

A friend of mine was having work done on his mom’s house; old blueprints were laying around, and I asked if I could have a copy to play around with. I built the house, roughly textured it, and it came out pretty good! So, I went back and did some duplication, creating a small scene. This didn’t get used for anything important – which is a shame, because it came out looking really nice, given the year it was made!

A wireframe for a character I modeled on a personal project. A roommate and I met up with someone from Carnegie Mellon, who was looking at turning Unreal Tournament (a first-person shooter videogame) and modifying it to become a game about dance clubs. Players could do various dances, chat with the bartender (who was an early AI we were training on the side). The biggest problem is that none of the characters for a shooting game fit inside of a night club, so they talked to people at the local art school (me!) and got us to build stuff out. He was extremely low-poly (again, at the time), which was a big challenge for me at the time.

I’m not actually sure what this is. It LOOKS like I made a 3d model of a magic card… because, of course I did.

A friend of mine was in a punk band and needed an album cover, so I got to work! The idea was that everything on the left was post-apocalyptic, and on the right was futuristic. I actually drew most of this one on an old Wacom tablet, which would’ve been my first real project with it.

A warehouse I built for one of my animations. This one focused on a fan that came to life, unplugged itself, then used the wire to pry open the blade cage and fly to freedom.

My Art History class let us submit a project for extra credit, so I did a 3d rendering of some ancient hieroglyphics (I believe it’s my name). This was actually from my first semester at school, I just really liked how the rendering came out, and kept it around.

Cowboy Ron; probably my favorite pencil rendering. Better photos over here.

A self-portrait character I made for my demo reel. The animation was based on a real-life event that happened while working on my portfolio project the prior semester; I went downstairs to grab a coke out of the pop machine, it ate my dollar, so I kicked it. In reality, I stubbed my toe and limped for a few days (that part got cut from the reel, for some reason…).

Some gesture drawings that I thought came out really well. More can be found here, here, and here.

After everything, our work was graded. The grading process felt very harsh at the time – looking at my work now, maybe not. Interestingly, I felt like my porfolio was easily in the top 20% (confirmed by who got call-backs after graduation), but the grades didn’t support it. Go figure.