Last week the Amsterdam Fashion Institute hosted an event showcasing the outcomes of their most recent “3D Hypercraft” minor. The specialisation is offered to students every semester, and it allows them to explore the possibilities of 3D virtual prototyping from any perspective: design, management, branding or industry perspective. Every semester the students organise an exhibition to present their projects to industry experts and other interested guests. A jury panel rewards a few students who’ve shown outstanding work with an award for their approach and results.
As a recent graduate of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute and winner of one fo the awards two years ago, this year I joined the jury panel for the award. Together with Marie Bastian – 3D designer at adidas, and Iris van Wees – designer who just graduated from AMFI using 3D in her work, we assessed the students’ work.
The process of creating of new materials, solely for the sake of scanning and generating normal maps to boost the realisticness of 3D materials – pushing the boundaries of 3D to another level
Impressed by all the different approaches of the students and their personal background and experience, we got to know their projects and end products. Whereas some students chose to keep their work completely digital, without leaving any traces of physical experimentation or final product realisation, other students chose to explore the connection between 3D garments and their physical counterparts.
The topics and inspiration of the projects ranged from traveling nomads, to virtual tailoring solutions and protecting ourselves for an approaching apocalypse. Some projects evolved around disassembling and reassembling, other students aimed to replicate their traditional design process in 3D and other students tried to let the 3D software lead them towards a new design process.
In the end we unanimously agreed on three winners for the awards. All three of them had a unique approach and vision which made their projects stand out in the group, and they managed to impress us with their ingenuity, vision and accomplishments. Lara Simons convinced us with her overall clear and complete story, implementing 3D for a new design workflow and presenting her garments with well executed AR imagery.
Francesca Harvey (instagram), an exchange student from Kingston University, showed an outstanding level of potential. Her project reflected a lot of effort and commitment towards the implementation of 3D, and all of us appreciated her open mindset and determination to share her 3D knowledge and skills with fellow students at her home university. A great ambassador for our ever growing 3D community!
Cornel Doornebosch (instagram) presented the perfect example of “pushing the boundaries of 3D” with her project BODYCOTT. While working in 3D she wasn’t happy with the results of the textures and materials, so instead she decided to “exaggerate” textures and their depths by creating new physical materials in order to generate normal maps out of these materials. These unique normal maps brought a new level of realistic feeling to the textures in 3D.
Congratulations to all students for their amazing process and achievements, let’s keep pushing the boundaries of this industry and I’m already looking forward to the next group of students to apply their creative thinking and designs into our world of 3D fashion!