I made my Rube Goldberg machine breakfast themed. It starts with the alarm clock going off, which is connected electrically to the toaster and makes the toaster begin cooking the toast (not the most realistic thing I've ever done...). When the toast goes down, the spoon swings forward and knocks the orange down the ramps. At the bottom of the ramps, the oranges knock over the dominos which eventually cause the lever on the other side of the scene to turn the newspaper page. The lever hits another lever which flings the teabag into its cup. That lever hits a gear which reaches for the lever with the sugar on it but doesn't quite make it. At the end of the animation, the toast flies up from the other side and knocks the sugar cube into the cup. 

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This project was a labor of love. I used the Maya Software Renderer and I was never able to figure out how to add shadows -- but on the bright side, using the software renderer and not having shadows made render much, much faster. I used the 3 key to give a more rounded view to many of the objects in my animation, and I didn't realize until too late that that rounded look doesn't carry over to the renderer. As a result, there are a lot more sharp corners and edges in my animation than I had planned.

 I definitely struggled more with Maya this time, and there were lots of inexplicable roadblocks with dynamics. The lighting was also really tricky. I ended up using three area lights, but I spent so long moving them around and trying to decide what looked best. I mostly used dynamics with a bit of keyframing here and there (on the toaster and to add the bend in the page turning). Overall, I'm happy with how the project turned out.