I served as the Lead Graphics Artist at The Athena Group, Inc. where we created educational simulations for students grades 4 through 12 along with a few for college students. The idea behind the simulations was to expose students at a younger age to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics topics through an engaging, interactive medium. The sims were designed to be played in a web browser, but recently AthenaEd has been working to give them tablet support. You can browse all of AthenaEd's simulations here at STEMSims.com
Management would give a high level idea of what each sim would be about and how they wanted it to look, and from there I would iterate on the graphics, making sure every element was implemented correctly alongside the programmers. I mainly used Maya and Photoshop with a dash of After Effects to create these sims. Although we had a team of artists at AthenaEd where we collaboratively built the sims, the following modules I solely developed.
Mass Spectrometry - This sim was apart of the eClinic project, which involved medical simulations to help out college students. Here you can click on the different parts of a mass spectrometer to learn more about the machine and it's functionality.
Platelets - When this simulation is loaded up, a pre-rendered image of blood cells and platelets is shown through the virtual microscope. The sim has a set of pre-rendered images that it randomly selects from each time you play. Each render was created in Maya with the help of a script I made which randomly places a set number of spheres on a plane and then utilizes another script to pass a perlin noise deformer on each of the spheres to make a random blood cell shape. Viola! Many unique peripheral smears made really fast!
Erosion Control - Within the Erosion control simulation the user can place a mound of mixed materials or sand at the top of the stream table and then turn on a water system to wash the stuff down. The water simulation for that was created in Maya with the help of a flowing particle system.
The second half of Erosion Control involves building up a cost effective barrier next to basketball court to help prevent mad destruction from a landslide. The user can select which elements they want to add to the barrier and then when ready, they can cause a landslide to happen and observe how well the barrier held up. A cartoony landslide animation was made in After Effects for this.
Energy Land - It may not look like it, but most of Energy Land was made in Maya. The island is actual sculpt-deformed geometry complimented by a fluid effect ocean volume around it. The tree lines and cityscape were added with Maya's paint effects.
