Anitavr Evidence of research into employment and progression opportunities
A professional online presence in the form of a website and/or blog
A showreel
An online portfolio of design materials and immersive content
Critical Appraisal (1,000 words)
Empty store is a pop-up exhibition space that aims to support digital fashion artists, by displaying artists’ work and making them interactable with the physical space. Empty store will allow users to interact with the digital assets through the means of AR – merging the physical environment with augmented reality. Creating an immersive experience for the public, will lead to a more effective way to express the voice and vision of digital artists, not to mention how the artworks will come to life in AR, combining the visuals with sound and surroundings.
I have always been interested in fashion, how the world and the industry of it works. Especially in the last year I started deepening my knowledge in digital fashion, and I took part in a summer course in Amsterdam Fashion School that taught me how to make 3D garments, and understood how the process to create digital fashion is so similar to physical fashion.
Also digital fashion allows to save so much waste during the prototyping phase, and produces a minimum amount of CO2, which is a good comparison to physical fashion, which is the second industry for pollution production:
With the fashion digitalization especially after Covid 19, Fashion has been highly affected by this phenomenon, both as regards to the future of brick-and-mortar stores, from a production point of view. A high percentage of physical stores were forced to shut down between 2020-22, leading to the lost the popularity of the high streets, full of retail stores, and to the rise of e-commerce. Many brands changed their strategy, by turning simple retail shops, into a more visual and conceptual exposition space with few garments and accessories.
Such as the South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster, that created in every shop a sort of contemporary art exhibition, where the glasses take part in, or Odin Fragrance that rescales small perfumes, making them the center of attention, Jaquemus creating pop-up vending machines where customers can buy all sort of accessories, to Adidas Original making pop up spaces appear, that reflect streetwear culture and Adidas being part of it during its development.
It will be a space given by LCC, where there will be few physical installations and projections on the walls. Being a pop-up store, the aim would be to make the installation easy for transport and to build once on site. Eco-sustainable materials will be prioritized for the physical elements.
Space would be around 3×3 meters.
Empty store will reflect my experience in London so far and all the challenges this metropolis puts in front of me, in particular, it will focus on the theme of loneliness, estrangement and frustration, and how I manage to overcome these feelings day by day. Therefore, the physical space will resemble common London scenarios where I experience such emotions, and for each scene, there would be in AR a 3D avatar, interacting with the surroundings, wearing monumental, almost theatrical digital clothes, as a symbol of embracing identity, self-expression, confidence, and creativity that help not feeling lost in such a big city like London.
As a souvenir from the exhibition I thought it could be fun to have these stickers and encourage people to stick them on their clothes. in AR they would work as Target images and make some 3d asset appear on them.
For this unity we were asked to make a Worked Based Portfolio, to include key elements of professional personal presentationsuch as CV, covering letter and online portfolio, review the guezt lectures we had during the term, and talk about the process about the Sheffield Graveyard Project, what I’ve personally done for it and the final result with everyones contribution to it.
I decided to not turn my university blog into my final online portfolio required for this unity, because I wanted it to be more simple, full of images video that would focus the attention of the potential new boss
I found out EditorX while on youtube, appearing as an ad. I’ve already used it previously for a personal project, really enjoyed the interface, pretty straight forward, simple to understand and with all the assets I needed, therefore I tough it could be a good idea to create my portfolio on this platform.
PORTFOLIO LINK: https://anitaghaffa.editorx.io/anita-ghaffarian
Decided to divide my website in
here you’ll find my name and a short video trailer with a sum up of all my best projects I’ve done so far.
Currently I’m still working on the trailer, because it requires a bit of time to revise all the screen recording pictures, and actual past projects I have, so I is a long process. I personally don’t have experience in video editing so my idea is to make a simple showreel with my best shorts, few basic descriptions of the projects and what I do.
Here I decided to use a layout given by the platform that uses square pictures with a brief description that if clicked can redirect you to the anchor located in the same page, where you can know more about the single project finding more description and youtube videos.
I decided to include my Global Campus studio project collaboration, since is a good example of team work and also shows my skills in graphoc design.
I inclued for 3d Modelling exaples the perfect holiday destination project and my charachter desing & animation, plus couple of personal projects modelling 3d fashion accessories, that can be an exaple of what I’m interested to and as well an example of realistic modelling.
For vr I included my serious game from my first year and my new game I’ve been working on this second year, because both are projects that I’ve work on by my self from the idea to the final result, showing my skillls in 3d modelling, animation, coding and overall my abiity in using Maya and Unity.
Here is a sort of resume with my general info, an overview to understand my interests, past experience, education and languages spoken and my software knowledge.
I used a layout from editor x wich I found really useful
here you can find all my detail, from facebook, linkedIn, youtube Channel and email. You also can message me straight from the page that will redirect the message to my personal email.
After setting up all the website I took time to make my video portfolio that I’ll add in the home page. It has a sum up of my best works and I’ve uploaded on youtube, so it is easy for everyone to see it.
I’ve enjoyed a lot creating my own website, my next step will be having the personalized URL. I also want to set up in my future an artstation portfolio, because after attending a lecture at LCC with a game art recruiter, during his speach he said that most of the people use Artstation to share their work online and that the companies are more familiar with taht platform and tend to check that one during the hiring process.
For my resume I decided to follow Ed Tlegenov advice, one of our gest lecturers for this unit. Ed is part of the research team for Autdesk and adviced us to have an easy to scan resume that the logarithm that big tech companies use can read easity, in oder to have our CV seen by an actual person and get to the next step.
I used to have a more visual Resume divided in two columns:
After Ed’s lecture I’ve changed it by:
My cover letter I a short presentation of my self that includes what I’m currently doing, my education back ground, my most recent and relevant Project I’ve been working on and My most relevant skills for that job position regarding both technical or language knowledge.
For this unit we have to do a VR game/experience that is interactive and that runs for Oculus Quest 2. We had complete freedom as regards the main theme and structure of our game.
My first though for this project was that I wanted it to look pleasant, this a really reach environment full of colour and element to get lost into, trying to recreate a surreal atmosphere. I started thinking about lice in Wonderland, which has the surreal and magic atosphere that I was looking for, started to search for images of clips both from the animation and movie and did a moodboard with few pics of what I enjoy the most about the aesthethic.
I started focusing mainly on the chess scene in the Movie where Alice is as big as the pawns, and another interesting scene which is when she Fights the Queen, the main enemy of the whole plot. here there is the link of the scene I’m refferring to:
I though that it could be interesting and challenging making a VR game, where the player is on a sort of distorted – chess board, on multiple levels, where the aim is to survive all the enemies that he/she encounters on the way, which will be the pawn and other random obstacles. To make it more friendly for everyone I decided thta the player does not have to follow any chess scrict rule, infsact to avoid the other pawn the player can jump run or climb, but instead the pawn will only move following the rules. My main inspo for the interaction was this scene from Harry Potter where the characters are in this huge chess board and have to fight agaist the pieces following chess rules in order to survive,.
To actually start working on my project I usually start by modelling onMaya my main elemets in the scene. In this case I started on the path that the player will play on, by modelling it and giving a basic maya texture to make it seem more like a distorted chess board.
since I didn’t know how to play chess I had to look up the basic chess pieces moves and just wrote them down on my sketchbook to remember them easier
to give the dreamy feeling I added a cloud shader to the chess board and activated the “fog” option in the inspector
After giving a general shape to what my scene would look like, with the main path and couple of environmental elements, I focused of the actual mechanics of the game that involves coding, to make it an actual survival game.
When I played the game all the chess pieces where showing up at the same time so I needed to find some way to make them appear gradually as the player gets closer to them.
this script requires referencing with Player, the Pawn and distance. It checks if player is in range with a pawn in a certain distance, it will activate the pawn in the scene, or else the rest will remain hidden. This function will loop for each pawn in this distance.
The main aim for my game is to try to avoid the chess pieces in order to survive and win the game. I needed a script that would:
To make the player understand how far they achieved in the game, I added a simple score system that just says how far the player went using numbers. Youtube video
the path is developed in 3 levels. to go one level to another there is a big step that you can not climb up, therefore I made these moving platform that work as lifts because can transfer the player up and down just by stepping on it. Link for the tutorial I followed:
this is the main interaction in VR with the player. the player has to pick up the ball and throw it againt the king to decrease his health and destroy it in the end. Had some technical issues:
as it can be seen from the video it is spawining more than 3 balls per time. I decided to keep it like this because trying in VR is easier to pick up the balls since the playre has more possibilities and it also fits the crazy aesthetics.
As it can be seen from the video it needs to:
I made a short showreel showing a little bit of everything I’ve worked onto meke this VR game. the song is the same that I’ve used in the background in the game Aphex Twin – Elio
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s-jBtrfTV5ikGLW2QIL5Zkzmdn3DBwat/view?usp=sharing
Here there is the apk of my final project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s-jBtrfTV5ikGLW2QIL5Zkzmdn3DBwat/view?usp=sharing
I’ve enjoyed a lot working on this project, I went though a lot of challenges since the beginning starting with the idea which changed a lot troghout the process, to building the mechanincs which required a bit of coding. I’ve learnt a lot more about C#, I’ve noticed that since last year my understanding of the language has improved a lot.
Checkmate VR is a VR survival game that challenges the player to survive a long distorted chessboard full of enemies, which are the basic chess pieces jumping around and moving following chess rules. The final step is to do checkmate by trowing this spiky ball to the King do decrease his health, but at the same time there is the Queen that tries her best to get in the player way.
It is an Immersive Virtual Reality game, where the player can experience a surreal world, which only VR can give, where our usual human point of view is rescaled and everything around us that in real life we are used to see small and innocent is huge and dangerous. I wanted to give another meaning to simple objects of our day to day life creating a whole new journey in this inspired Alice in Wonderland World.
I’m really happy with the result, all the basic mechanics work as I wanted and the visual surroundings are as I was planning of.
In the future I’d like to imrove it on the VR interaction, since during this period I could work on too much due to technical issues regarding my PC, which can’t support VR anymore, and I had the opportunity to see in VR only when I was onsite, which wan’t enough.
To improve the interactions I would have liked to keep the controlers and to match specific kind of hand movement to a movement in VR. for example if in reality you are moving the controllers fast up and down, in VR that means you are running. other wise by moving the controllers left and right that would change the direction in VR. for now a stick to basic movement controlled by the joystick to move in 4 direction and to a default speed.
Eadweard Muybridge was an English pioneer for his work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection, analysing animal and people movement frame by frame.
In class I analysed this short clip from A Goofy Movie, by screenshotting the frames that I considered relevant for the animation. Goofy appears like a elastic figure trying to get out of the car but bouncing back because of the security belt.
I decided to do a happy walk and look for resources on Internet
to make this animation we had to record ourselves doing a “dramatic scene” and use it as a reference for the animation. Here’s the result
In order to create a character that can ommunicate to the public, we should understand: the shapes it is made of, how it’s volume behavies, how it moves in the environment and its colours, why we chose those colour and what we want to say about its personality through them.
I chose to analyse Clancy, from Midnight gospel
Head composed by a triangle (hat) that dominates the character figure and the actual head that is a small circle but in proportion with the body.
TRIANGLE
The character , I think is in between being sharp and low intelligence, because during his journeys he meets characters and can keep up with conversations and ask questions about the episod topic, but at the same time he is learning from the other characters, trying to grow up in terms of self-aknowledgement
the CIRCLE can indicate he is a quite young character.
SQUARE BODY
In his main state the body can be inscribed in a rectangular shape, soft lines. He changes his body depending on the episode.
It is a solid body, infact Clancy has this body in his main World where his stability and regular life style is. He can be considered reliable and peacefull.
To study the colour I used color.adobe.com to understand the which priciple was used for the colour choice.
For this unit we had to write an essay; this is the first academical essay that I’ writing, therefore it’s been a bit difficult for me under the language skills and organizing the point of my idea of view, but also because I was unsure about which top I’d liked to discuss.
Initially, I wanted to write about how much visual realism is related to the presence and affects the level of immersive ness of the player, but then I did not have enough resources and interest in developing this topic, I wrote down roughly half of it but I never continued because of the lack of affinity to my personal. After I thought about a topic that would catch my interest concretely, and I tough it could be interesting if I spoke about the relationship between fashion and virtual reality, in particular, whether VR can give the same kind of emotions as physical fashion shows and also the environmental impact with and without using VR.
I found my references mainly online, for example, online magazines like Vogue and websites, like Highsnobety, the Fabricant and I used also youtube videos, trying to give an overall explanation about fashion and how fashion used advanced technologies during the decades especially VR.
I discovered a really good example of a complete VR shopping experience led by Alibaba in 2016 “Buy+”, that allows players to purchase articles across China, USA, Australia’s shops.https://www.youtube.com/embed/-HcKRBKlilg?feature=oembed
other than virtual shopping experiences (V-commerce) I centred my attention towards fashion weeks, which create loads of pollution due to countless trips both for business and for guests to attend the catwalks. I found two main examples of virtual catwalks, one from Topshop (2014) the other from Tommy Hilfiger (2015).https://www.youtube.com/embed/lUal_Lrhec0?feature=oembed
The fabricant (https://www.thefabricant.com/), which I already knew, a digital fashion house, that believes in creating garments only digitally through 3D modelling that can be used and traded in virtual realities. I always found their work really interesting and pretty straight forward, where clothes are created only for a digital market “free from the constraints of the material world.”
another article that helped me out a lot with concrete statistics and data was one found on https://www.ordre.com/en with carbon emissions from the travel associated with the ready-to-wear wholesale buying process by fashion week (tCO2e) here’s the table:
after I found all my resources I started writing straight after, I was motivated and managed to write down the whole essay in 2 writing session plus one revising the grammar and organizing my resources list. For the resources, I found an amazing website (MyBib) that created a list of all the links and articles I’ve saved and formatted in the style I needed (APA).