Shrine of the Master Emerald

In 2010 I started taking animation classes and learned to use Maya. Those renderings of the Master Emerald shrine and Chaos Emeralds from Sonic Adventure were some of the first things I made with it, and it definitely shows. I actually did another render in 2011 to see how much my skills improved over the year, and the answer was "significantly so."

Then in 2020 my Maya license finally caught on that I'd been done with my classes for 8 years and kicked me out for good, so I had to learn Blender if I wanted to keep making 3D stuff. Which I did. And to keep up the tradition I apparently started, I made the Master Emerald shrine yet again!

And then I did it AGAIN in 2022, which is the version posted here. I also did the emeralds this time since I learned how glass shaders work, and can use Cycles now because my GPU drivers aren't outdated anymore.

Anyway, I don't plan on posting the 2011 or 2020 versions here because this is what I consider the final and definitive version and it's more fun to compare it to the very first, but if you REALLY want to see the others you can do some digging and find them out there.

Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Adventure are (C) SEGA