I built up through everything properly before attempting anything ambitious, basic shapes and materials, lighting, lathes for rounded objects like bottles and vases, transparency and luminance for glass and glowing effects, box modelling my way through an entire house, cloth simulation for a flag moving in simulated wind, and a retro robot built from merged shapes with hinged joints and its own simple logo.

The final piece pulled all of it together, a sculpted dragon head, built by pulling and smoothing a sphere into cheekbones, a snout, brow, and eye sockets, then texturing it with a moon surface and the rest with sandstone. It's a strange combination on paper, but rendered properly, with the lighting worked out to actually flatter the texture rather than flatten it, it came together into something I was genuinely proud of.