Is There Really No Happiness MV

Skills Used: Blender 3D, Blender Grease Pencil, After Effects

The aim for this animation was to create a unofficial music video for the song "Is There Really No Happiness" by Porter Robinson. I enjoyed his new album and the mood of this song in particular stood out to me so I went with it. The album art used a specific color palette, so those were the colors that I chose to use as well. The more "toon" and hand-drawn feel of the video was deliberately chosen to create the feeling of childhood nostalgia (the theme of the song), but also because I was on a tight schedule. I used the rooms to draw parallels to memories further emphasizing the nostalgic effect. Since it is a music video, I didn't have a clear storyline for replay-ability, but rather just to recreate scenes and a feelings that the viewer could relate to. The focus was to think more about the cohesiveness and the bigger picture of the music video. Since it was for a final project, the timeline I had to achieve the finished product was very tight, I had to choose Some things to compromise with. As stated before, the "toon" feeling was partially because of the schedule, though other things that I compromised on were the bigger backgrounds (I only used an hdri), and the 3D animation (I got open source motion capture data from Mixamo). Through this project I experienced what it is like to keep a realistic schedule and product, and balance out all aspects.

This project required many skills that were new to me at the time, and was made as the final for an animation course. During the process of creating this animation, I self taught how to use Blender Grease Pencil and how to animate in 3D for the first time. Although it was a risky move at the time since I was on a rushed timeline, I still made the decision to try something new as I believe it is best to tackle things head on if the interest is there.

"Shoulder Meowdy" Stuffed Toy

Skills Used: Blender 3D modeling, Creating Patterns, Sewing Machine, Experience Design

The Shoulder Meowdy was a project designed under the prompt: "Design a toy for someone specific in your life" The person that I chose was one of my friends, one with a unique style and that loved stuffed animals. When creating this toy, I was grappling with the idea of "play value," or in other words, "how do I make the user enjoy the play experience and keep them coming back to this toy?" I initially thought about making my friend a fidget toy since in my interview with her before the design proccess, she mentioned liking to move her hands a lot, but the toy had a requirement that it needed to be soft. Most fidget toys that I researched were made of hard plastic, there is a good reason for this though, it is easier to give a tactile response when using hard material. While researching toys (going around stores and the internet looking and trying out toys) I found that there were a lot of baby toys that had this retractable element. I also found that it gave a nice tactile sensation: the vibration. Coming back to the idea of play value, I know that being able to fidget with the toy wouldn't be enough to keep coming back to it, so I found another element to implement: wearability. Remember in the beginning of this paragraph when I mentioned my friend having a unique style? That was how I knew she would love a stuffed animal on her shoulder. People come back to clothes time and time again, so this solved the last piece of my "play value" puzzle.

The rest of the design came easily, the cat shape was simply because my friend likes cats, and the color because black is the color of most of her wardrobe. I modeled the shape I wanted in Blender since that was most familiar to me, and the next step, creating the sewing pattern was not. It was completely new to me. I sliced the mesh of the 3D model so that it would lay flat and used that as the pattern. To get the cat to balance on the shoulder, I added weight to the toy by stuffing some of it with rice, which was also nice because the weight made the tactile vibrations come through more. The vibration was also mimicking a cat purring, so it ended up suiting the image of the stuffed animal as well. I ended up showing the finished project in the Interactive Media Arts Show in Shanghai, and it was very popular there. I also made one for myself since I had to part ways with it giving it my friend. It is surprising that something designed for one specific person ended up having such wide appeal.

Portfolio Website aka the website you are browsing right now

Portfolio Site

Skills Used: Blender 3D modeling, HTML, Javascript: 3js library, CSS

I had decided that my portfolio website needed a refresh, and I wanted to implement more of my skills into the actual creation of the site to make it look more personal. While thinking about the design of my website, I knew I wanted to make it 3D somehow; and so I came across the 3js Javascript library. The first step was thinking about the layout of the website, I drew a lot of inspiration from the example websites on the 3js website, and most of my learning was from their documentation page. Many of the portfolio site featured was of a desk, or room; which makes sense because coders and designers do spend a lot of time at a desk. I wanted my portfolio site to feel personable and give the experience of discovery upon first visit. That's how I decided to go with the visitor being the mouse on my desk, being able to click into things to discover information.

The proccess was broken up into many different steps: creating the 3D environment in Blender, importing that into Visual Studio Code, setting up the rest of the scene with 3js, creating the mouse "player", and the rest of the HTML and CSS elements; some steps were a lot more difficult than others. This website was the first time creating one from scratch for me, so there were many things that popped up along the proccess that I had never thought about before. Because of the nature of the website, it was sort of like programming a game; which I have also never done before. This was a website full of firsts. The "map" of the desk, how the mouse "player" was going to move, and the mouse collisions were all problems that I had to solve one step at a time. Through this project I learned the importance of solving one problem at a time and breaking apart a big project into smaller, more digestible pieces. When I first started, I didn't think the scale was going to be as big as it was because I didn't layout all the aspects that needed to be considered.