Week 1
This was a busy week with enrolment, meeting the lectures and my fellow students and we’ve been given an overview of our modules for this semester. One of the key areas to get started on was to start thinking about our mind map and I managed to get started with mapping this out using Miro which I found really helpful and quick for building the map. Putting the map together really helped me to consider which areas of interest I’d like to cover for the initial experimentation module.
I was keen to get started on some additional learning so I enrolled and got started on a Blender and Rhino & Pythonscript courses via Future Learn and I managed to watch nearly all of the 3D Fashion Tech Festival online, which gave me more questions and research material but what great timing!! Along side this I was able to watch some of the talks online from Premiere Vision where I was keen to hear about sustainability, digital tech, sourcing and trend information. I also used this week to familiarise myself with the Universities estudio page to search for literature and links for workshops and the available facilities. As I’d already done some prior research on digital fashion I reflected on a presentation I’d created earlier in the year, it’s definitely still relevant but I feel that the digital space has moved on so much in such a short space of time.
Mind Map
Mind Map
I’d been researching ALOT prior to enrolling so I already had some ideas of what I’d like to do during my MA, but I really felt overloaded with information and it was mostly in my head or bookmarked in my search engine. Creating an initial Mind Map was certainly a great starting point to be able to show and identify areas in digital fashion that I’m interested in and it helped to pull together all my learning and encouraged me to consider further research areas and training that I’d need to complete if I was going to be able to achieve my final goals.
With the use of images I was able to visualise areas of interest and identify a current landscape for digital fashion and with the sticker notes I was able to explain my rationale and requirements that I’d like to cover from my initial research.
To get started I used the term Digital Fashion and thought about all the aspects that I felt should come from this, making sure that I was also considering the reality of a digital and physical garment.
Rhino & Pythonscript
Since entering into this digital world over a year ago I’ve been keen to learn new programmes and discover the power of what they can create. The idea of learning coding to improve my design experience and open up creativity would never have occurred to me whilst working in previous design/pattern cutting roles. But I now feel free to explore, make mistakes, learn and see where it may take me.
I’ve began working my way through a course on Future Learn (see link below) in the summer 2021 and to be honest it’s been challenging and I found it difficult to fully understand the coding processes, terminology and order for instructions but I managed to understand some basics and can turn off and put parts of the code on and make some alterations to the provided code. So here I go at my second attempt at this course. With one of my key areas being 3D printing I feel that I must revisit this course as I feel it will be very beneficial in aiding my creations so I choose this week to start! I’m pleased to say I had a good first weeks learning and it felt easier as I’d already covered this content previously, so a lot of what the tutor was saying was making sense. The first week covered an introduction to the rhino & pythonscript environments, the data types, how to set down point values, variables, transformations, how to input code to create shapes/paths and how to copy/scale and rotate and create the bones of your shape.
FutureLearn. “Page from Design Computing: 3D Modeling in Rhinoceros with Python Rhinoscript – University of Michigan.” FutureLearn, http://www.futurelearn.com/courses/design-computing-3d-modeling-in-rhinoceros-with-python-rhinoscript/2/todo/94020. Accessed 1 Nov. 2021.
Blender
This course was great for getting me started to working in an alternative 3D environment. A 10 week course that was only set at 2 hours a week. I was able to complete four of the session is this first week and felt like I was moving on with aspects of creating and altering the created meshs and although the course wasn’t specific for fashion I knew I’d be able to translate the learning into fashion creation.
FutureLearn. “Page from Introduction to 3D Animation Using Blender – vr Voom.” FutureLearn, http://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-into-3d-modelling-animation/1/todo/120114. Accessed 1 Nov. 2021.
Motif 3D Tech Festival
Talk about perfect timing!! This festival kicked off just as we’d enrolled on our MA so it was a great way of getting started and it was wonderful to hear from companies and how they are using 3D technologies and what’s in store for the future. There were many things that stuck out for me with talks around the Metaverse and how digital fashion assets are being sold as NFT’s, sizing of avatars and a talk by Dinesh, K. Pai, Ph.D. Titles -Soft Avatars for fit testing, this one really got me thinking as I’d never even considered this fact that the current avatars don’t allow for actual body/skin pressures so it’ll be nice to see this feature evolve into future avatars. I’ve attached the report for the event and also the 2020 report
“3D Tech Festival 2021.” MOTIF, motif.org/event/3d-tech-festival-2021/#exec-summary. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.
The Fashion Landscape – Presentation
The below is a presentation I created for a job interview where I was asked to research the current fashion landscape and consider how this could be aligned to academic teaching. In the presentation I reflect on how the pandemic and environmental issues have driven the use and application for 3D Fashion and I explore the advantages of working in 3D environments and highlight how the industry and academic institutes adapted in a time of crisis, I then go on to explore some recommendations for the future. Through creating this presentation I was able to pool together all my research and I found it a great way of documenting current information.
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