Game Boy ✱ Pokémon Red

yesterday's stamp collection in a grid

ai is close to making whatever i want and i genuinely don't know if i like that but i'm having so much fun it's stupid

i asked claude opus 5.5 to make swedish stamp designs in javascript

i modeled this walkman by hand, part by part gpt-6 astra rigged it, animated it, lit it, shot it and interacted with it, all inside blender and a custom three.js viewer i art-directed the whole thing through conversation being a 3d designer has never been more fun

Took a detour and modeled headphones for the Walkman.

Sony Walkman TPS-L2. Modeling finally done. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on eBay and YouTube staring at close-up photos and teardown videos of a 47-year-old cassette player just to get the details right. Worth every minute though. Materials and rendering next.

Been a while since I tweeted, so here's a Casio LC-785 from 1982 that I modeled and rendered through a semi-cartoon shader.

every day working with ai brings me one step closer to interactive cartoons i can finally play with in real-time continuing my key chain build in three.js with claude code added a toon shader and a debug panel to work out some bugs when there are multiple objects in the scene

adding new key chains to this beast

nobody told me learning three.js would make 3d feel interesting again

creating new assets for a personal three.js project

designers are struggling to find work and i keep seeing the same complaint: studios are hiring less, competition is up, it's not what it used to be. i can't compare. i've only been freelancing since last year. all i've ever known is posting on twitter and getting work from here. the thing i keep noticing though is that none of the people complaining are on social media. i don't even like social media. haven't had a personal account since 2020. i'm here for professional reasons, full stop. but i figured out pretty fast that if you're not online, you don't exist. not unless you've already made a name for yourself through other means. the game moved. it's here now. i genuinely wish more designers would just start sharing their work. not because it's fun or because you're supposed to, but because this place gets richer every time someone does. more work to draw from, more people to learn from, more proof that the industry is alive. if this finds anyone sitting on work they haven't posted yet, just post it.

Closing in on a year of full-time freelancing as a 3D designer. Everyone sells the solo dream. Be your own boss, build your own thing, answer to no one. What I actually want is the opposite. Fewer clients, longer relationships. Maybe even join a team full-time, spend time with passion projects on the side. Working with good people beats working alone, every time.

A year and a half later, this is still my most referenced piece in client calls. People show up with it already in their mood boards, before we’ve spoken a word. It was a personal project I made for fun. Nothing else. Unsupervised work has a longer shelf life than you’d think.

Hot take: 3D designers probably have above-average attention spans. Modeling is tedious as fuck. So is texturing and literally any other part of 3D. Anyone who survives past the donut tutorial has already proven they can sit with something boring until it isn't. That's probably why I still get the urge to start one.

Am I the only one who still gets the urge to start a blog?

Clay render with proper lighting. This is the last stop before materials go on. Everything you're seeing here, from the form and silhouette to the shadows, is just geometry doing its job. The color and detail hasn't arrived yet. It's going to change everything.