Introduction

Hello, my name is Sinjin Samaluk, and I am an East Carolina University graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Animation/Interactive Design. I love working with digital 3D modeling, and I use Maya and Blender to make my scenes come to life. I model in different styles depending on what I am working on, from a realistic representation to a stylized art form.

Demo Reel

Merp's World

I wanted to model a character I drew on a whim one day, an alien named Merp. I pictured them on a dry planet like Mars and wanted to give them a nice desert scene. The landscapes that I have seen are also pretty barren with nothing but dirt or sand and some rocks, so I incorporated it into his world. I wanted to give Merp a hard textured skin that looked dry to fit into the environment I wanted to put them in. Tools: Blender 2021.

The Art of Lock-Picking

Here I wanted to show how the inner mechanisms of a standard lock work. I thought opening a lock with a key was boring, so I decided to showcase a lock by picking it. Locks aren't as complicated as I thought they were initially; the only thing you need to do to pick a lock is to line up all of the pins so you can turn your pick tools to release the lock. This model was fun to texture, and I learned something new about locks. Tools: Maya 2020.

BlackSmith Workshop

For this 3D environment, I created a workshop for a 19th-century blacksmith. I am fascinated by the craft of a blacksmith; it is an interesting occupation in itself, and blacksmithing also uses a lot of cool tools that I thought would be fun to model and texture. In this slow pan-through of the environment, you can see the different tools used in a workshop. Tools: Maya 2019

Across the way

Across the Way was an entirely new and fun experience because I had to make a stop motion animation. I decided on a story of two creatures that lived near each other but hadn't interacted before. Finally, they choose to check each other out, but there is a surprising ending! It was a lot of fun to work with a new medium and form of animation that I had never used before. Tools: Mixed Media, Adobe Premiere 2020.

Cool day campfire

I have always enjoyed coming up with a scene and modeling it out. So I thought to make a campfire scene with cool colored tones throughout the set that contrasted with the fire's warm colors. I added grass and trees to make it feel like the viewer is in a small opening in a forest that a traveler decided to stop and relax. I had a fun time making this, and it was a joy to mess with some of the colors and lighting of this scene. Tools: Blender 2021.