I few years ago I got really into 3D modeling. I had a few lessons as part of a Music Production course and also worked my way through some tutorials online. 3D modeling is like making pottery without getting your hands dirty (I've never actually made pottery, but it sounds like an appropriate metaphor).

Besides the satisfaction of creating a complex object out of nothing and being able to see it from a variety of different angles, the most exciting thing for me was being able to assign physical properties to objects, like weight and gravity, and seeing it come to life. It's like playing god!

During my first lessons I learned to create simple geometric shapes, like cubes, spheres, cylinders, pipes, etc. What's exciting about that? Well, half pipe tubes and spheres are the essential elements to make a rube goldberg machine! Nothing is more exciting to an engineer than making a rube goldberg machine!

The video below is a compilation of various angles of my first (and only) attempt at 3D modeling a rube goldberg machine. I was a poor student at the time so I used a non-commercial version of Maya, which didn't let me properly render animations, so I had to screencast the animation without any textures (though I really liked the Tron-like visual aspect it gave it). I wanted to use Aphex Twin's Bucephalus Bouncing Ball as a backing track but YouTube was probably going to block it, so I used an old tune I made instead.

Some time later I got myself a proper copy of Maya and worked through a Podracer tutorial, which included texturing, lighting and animation. The end result was lot more realistic and professional looking, though following a tutorial step by step is never as satisfying as coming up with your own original ideas and seeing them come to life.