Meet the Maker

Meet Juwan! He’s teamed up with instructor Andrew as part of Game-U’s New Jersey Accelerate program. Since Juwan’s a big fan of C. H. Greenblatt’s show Harvey Beaks, he’s been modeling 3D fan art of its avian characters. Recently, Juwan also created a Tumblr account to share his fan art with Greenblatt. Check out Greenblatt’s reply!

Using Maya, the professional 3D modeling and animation software, Juwan worked with reference images and many different geometry and texturing tools to recreate the main characters of Harvey Beaks, specifically Harvey Beaks himself and his two friends, Fee and Foo. Harvey was Juwan’s very first 3D model, and his relatively simple figure made the project a great way to learn about 3D transformations and primitive shapes.

Fee and Foo, however, were more complicated endeavors – especially Fee! Juwan took his skills up a notch to model them. He used his completed Foo model as a base for Fee, gradually modifying it to include Fee’s distinctive physical traits. He sculpted Fee’s eyelashes, for example, by scaling down a sphere primitive and applying a sine wave deformer to it, giving the sphere a suitably curled shape. He created Fee’s hairdo by modeling a single strand of hair, duplicating and placing it around a hair “cap,” and randomizing the strands for a natural look. Here’s the result!

Juwan was so excited by the models he built that he and Andrew, after a suggestion from instructor Jess, next set up a Tumblr account where Juwan could showcase all his 3D designs. C. H. Greenblatt is on Tumblr, too, so Juwan shared his work with Greenblatt and asked a few questions about Harvey Beaks.Greenblatt not only answered all Juwan’s questions, but also encouraged him to stay in the course in Maya and 3D modeling: “The 3d stuff looks great. Keep it up!”

Looking great indeed, Juwan! You’re doing an amazing job learning 3D modeling and tackling the challenges that come with each project. Thanks for sharing your hard work with us, and thank you, Mr. Greenblatt, for taking the time to reply to Juwan’s message! Juwan, we look forward to all the cool stuff you’re going to create. Stay in touch!