3D Experimental Workshop

3D work from two courses at RIT. Most of this page is VCDE 617 Experimental Workshop with Adam Smith, spring 2026. Most weeks built on a Cinema 4D demo from Adam, which I rebuilt and then changed. The midterm and final answered his list of prompts, each one a design principle. At the bottom is VCDE 706 from the fall before, where the basics came from.

Final, five images

April 2026

Adam's prompts: Self / Simplicity / Contrast / Repetition / Proportion / Balance / Emphasis / Movement / Perspective or Depth

Movement
Movement. The midterm bust, now moving.
Contrast
Contrast. From the week 10 perfume demo.
Depth
Depth. From the week 14 demo.
Emphasis
Emphasis
Repetition
Repetition. From the week 13 demo.

Midterm, four images

February 2026

Emphasis

Emphasis

Movement

Movement

Self image

Self image

Simplicity

Simplicity

Week by week

Class exercises from Adam's weekly demos, in the order I made them.

Week 1 exercise
Week 1
Week 1 exercise
Week 1
Week 2 exercise
Week 2
Week 2 exercise
Week 2
Week 3 exercise
Week 3
Week 3 exercise
Week 3
Week 3 exercise
Week 3
Week 4 exercise
Week 4
Week 4 exercise
Week 4
Week 4 exercise
Week 4
Week 5 exercise
Week 5
Week 6 exercise
Week 6
Week 6 exercise
Week 6
Week 6 exercise
Week 6
Week 11 exercise
Week 11
Week 12 exercise
Week 12

Before the workshop

VCDE 706, 3D Modeling and Motion, with Daniel DeLuna, fall 2025. Four assignments, each with a brief that set the theme and the render setup.

01Fill the frame

Low poly island

Low poly island with a castle, forest and floating rocks

The brief asked for a frame packed with objects and a clear order of detail, with an AI compositional sketch as the starting point. I modeled the island in Blender and took it through a gray box pass before any color or light went in.

Brief: Redshift Sun and Sky rig / Depth of field / 1280 × 720

Reference photo

1. Reference photo

AI concept sketch

2. AI concept sketch

Gray box

3. Gray box

Final render

4. Final render

02Ten sketches, one robot

Hard surface character

AI character sketch 1
AI character sketch 2
AI character sketch 3
AI character sketch 4
AI character sketch 5
AI character sketch 6
AI character sketch 7
AI character sketch 8
AI character sketch 9
AI character sketch 10

The ten AI sketches. The outlined one is the robot I built.

A robot of my own design, built from separate parts that had to read as one machine. The brief required ten character sketches made with AI. The one with an old desktop computer for a head is the one I modeled in Blender.

Brief: Image-based lighting / Dome light / Three views

Robot with a retro computer head, standing on a hillside

0325, 75, final

Sculpted portrait bust

White sculpted bust with a glowing halo, lit warm from below

Final

Bust at 25%

25%

Bust at 75%

75%

Organic modeling with the sculpting tools in Cinema 4D. Sculpted from Cinema 4D's built-in bust preset, as the brief allowed.

Brief: Subsurface scattering / Colored area lights / Three-quarter view

04An ident for a channel that doesn't exist

Urban, TV ident, 15 seconds

Urban is a fictional television network about city culture. The assignment was its station ident.

1920 × 1080 / 15 s / Cinema 4D

The ident is driven by the concept of modular formation. As these elements gradually aggregate, they form a unified structure that resolves into the Urban logo.

From my concept statement

Cinema 4D · Blender · Redshift · After Effects