Clubs

After a year of hiatus from being involved in a Cal Poly club and with the huge wealth of knowledge I gained from my mentorship I decided that I wanted to pursue a place in the Cal Poly Racing club's Formula SAE team to gain some new experience in the racing world and to have a wider range of hands-on manufacturing knowledge. As a new member, I have joined the Aerodynamics team to work on carbon composites, metallic machining, and mold production. Although the design season is over, I hope to learn new CFD techniques and software as well as CAM procedures which have not been able to pick up during classes and other experiences. Under the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering department, we are able to use all of the machines in the Cal Poly Machine Shops as well as work with many Mechanical Engineering majors even within the aerodynamics team.

To further push my skills in Blender I have continued as a render artist for the Formula team and will carry those skills to design livery and sponsorship logo locations for the final vehicles ahead of competition.

To see more about Cal Poly Racing and the Formula SAE team click here and to see the department write up click here.

Below are a few of the renders that I have done so far to test texturing and render times.

In my first year at Cal Poly I attended the first meetings for roughly 10 different engineering clubs to see which one I wanted to join, I ended up choosing the Prototype Vehicles Laboratory (PROVE) which is in the Aerospace Engineering Department. The goal of the club is to break world records in renewable energy source vehicles, and their current project is a battery powered vehicle designed to break the world record of 999.5 miles traveled on a single charge with their car named Mila.

As a new member I worked under the chassis subsystem initially, but quickly shifted around to work with other new members for general design components directly under the project managers. I took over leadership of the general door, window, trunk, and hood design early on then progressively took the lead on lights, livery, and styling components. I took over as the Interior and Exterior Design Lead and managed a subsystem of 7 members in early 2020. At the same time, I started to produce renders of our car to present design ideas to the team effectively and taught myself how to use the free program Blender. Once the club was forced to go virtual I oversaw my team's documentation overhaul and held weekly meetings to oversee and manage subsystem progress. At the start of the summer of 2020, I decided to step away from PROVE to focus on my mentorship which took up enough time that I could not effectively lead or participate in the club.

To see more about PROVE visit their website here or the Aerospace department write up here.

Seen below is a selection of subsystem and design review renders that I created.

The other aspect of my time as the render artist for PROVE was creating striking visuals for use on social media. Still today the team is using the renders I made of Mila which can be seen next.