Before I decided to go back to school to be a boring biologist, I had a brief love affair with 3D modeling.  I spent a couple of years making low-poly props for a video game called Firearms:Source, based on the Half Life 2 engine.

Mostly this involved making boring stuff like sandbag walls, barbed wire and other typical war-zone obstacles.  Occasionally I got to do something interesting like a severed arm.  Incidentally,  searching Google for appropriate gore images to use as reference material for a severed limb is not something I’d recommend for the faint of heart.  My favourite models were the ones that don’t belong in any war zone:

These make me want to go back to modeling.  I have no idea what I’d do with any models I made, of course, even if I had the time to make them.

Maybe someday I can combine my affection for modeling with my interest in biology to make models of bacteria or something.  If I can find a modeling program that doesn’t suck and that works on the Mac.  Sigh.

More to come…

Gypsy moth caterpillar:

Had to stick a couple hundred of the darlings in the freezer this week - we had more than we needed for the experiment