Hawkflight Studios

Whoever designed this must have been missing most of their brain

Towards the end of my time at the University of New Mexico, I was looking for a few varied CS electives. A good friend of mine, Aaron Romero, had been taking the 3D animation class for the past year and suggested I give it a try. I was unsure about doing this as while I'm creatively inclined, my artistic skills are sorely lacking. I spent some time towards the end of the '01 year trying some things out in Alias Wavefront Maya, the program used in the class, with Aaron's help. I was able to model the first lion, the yellow one, prior to the class.

I decided to take him up on the suggestion and enrolled in the class. I knew ahead of time that the final project would be to create a short video to show off your skills, and the plan was to use the lion I had made. Thanks to the head start I got, I already had the basic knowledge taught in the class and was able to breeze through the assignments. This let me spend extra time modeling more lions. As a result, I was able to build the entire Voltron roster and create the final result which you can see here.

While the result was good, it apparently was a little too good. I got accused of cheating because the teacher didn't think I could produce the entire thing in the time I had. Thankfully, I was able to explain how I did and got an excellent grade for the project. I originally uploaded it to YouTube in 2007 just so that I could always find a copy of it. YouTube is no longer a place people store personal videos, but due to the subject, my video has incidentally garnered over 2 million views.