From the workbench notebook
Field notes
How this site was made, one decision at a time: what was tried, what stuck, and why.
A room instead of pages
The portfolio is a single patterning workshop you move through, with each project held by an object in it, so the sewing-pattern look becomes a place rather than a skin.
The camera follows a fixed path as you scroll instead of roaming freely. The first reader is usually a recruiter skimming fast, and a guided path gives the feeling of walking through a space without asking anyone to learn controls first. It also holds up better on phones.
The outline that broke the colours
Every object carries a thick hand-inked outline, after a Pinterest mood board of blobby, flat-shaded, stamp-like forms.
drei's Outlines component was the first try. In this drei and three pairing it silently corrupted the colour grading of the whole frame instead of drawing a line, with no console error. It was replaced with a dependency-free trick: a slightly larger copy of each mesh, drawn back faces only, in ink, just behind the real one.
Seventy-two metres was too long
The first layout put a station every ten metres or so down a 72 m hall, and it read as empty, with two projects stranded mid-aisle.
The hall was cut to 38 m and regrouped into three themed bays (research, built software, statistics), pairing projects across the aisle. The camera stands in the aisle and turns to face each one.
Props built from facts
Each project's object is built from a real fact in its write-up, not generic set dressing.
The NBA board is the project's actual data in pins and thread, with the least-squares line through all 184 players and the three players the diagnostics flagged circled. The layoffs board has two pattern pieces with the laid-off share cut away: 32.4% for private companies, 16.7% for public ones.
A machiya, built by script
The building is a Kyoto machiya generated by a Blender script: a shopfront on the street, a post-and-beam hall with skylights and pendant lamps, and a glowing shoji wall at the back.
It's exported with meshes merged by material, for few draw calls, then meshopt-compressed, which took the hall from 3.6 MB to 0.6 MB. With the street and the yard added since, it's about 1.5 MB.
The dress form is a real scan
The dress form at the capture station is a real garment scan from the capture pipeline, simplified in Blender to a few thousand faceted triangles in flat tones sampled from the scan's own texture.
The cutting table and the workbench are still procedural, waiting on their own captures. They'll go the same route: stylize in Blender, compress, and load in place of the stand-ins.
An evening's walk
The walk takes an evening: golden hour on the street at the entry, dusk by the storehouse at the end.
As you scroll, the sun sinks and reddens, the sky cools, and the street lanterns, the storehouse doorway and the garden lantern come up, until the first stars and a moon are out at the last stop.
The room is silent
An opt-in ambient sound toggle and a “ring the temple bell” button were both built and tried, and both were taken out. The room reads better quiet.