Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

AKA "My time in the Perceiving Systems department". It's a bit hard to define the job I did for over a year, but basically, I created virtual clothing to dress 3D scans of real people, working with fabric properties, animation sequences, and more. I also worked with several scanner systems, most notably the newest room-sized scanning systems by 3dMD, and collaborated with several researchers on their projects involving the digital study of the human body.

The Perceiving Systems department works in the field of Computer Vision, trying to "enable computers to understand the visual world of surfaces, materials, light and movement". Check out the About page here!

I mainly worked together with the researchers interested in the virtual representation of humans, helping to develop a more advanced version of a previous project titled DRAPE: Dressing Any Person. My main task was to create a large variety of clothing in a variety of sizes suitable to dress nearly any human adult. (Discounting physical disabilities or very extreme height differences; clothing to fit such sizes is easier changed by other digital means than a rigid grading of a pattern.)

This is a screenshot of OptiTex, the program I used to create the digital patterns. Pictured is a dress shirt, dressed on a male model (not a scan, but a digitally generated mesh).

So I'd have a 3D model of a person, dress it, run animations (often recorded in our Vicon system), save meshes, etc. I created a large variety of patterns, but will stick to basic patterns for this blog post to illustrate the job, rather than my creative abilities. (I may post more creative designs another time!)

In OptiTex I could change fabric parameters (affecting the draping and body of the garment), run custom animation sequences, and all sorts of other nifty things. Tons of fun! (Lots of work, too, but hey, who says work can't be play?) I'd love to upload a video sequence here, but unfortunately they're all too big. I can, however, share a video of a capture we did in the Vicon system - I'm pictured doing some stretches dressed in a velcro-fabric suit to which we stuck the Vicon markers. The system only captures the movement of the little silver markers, ignoring everything else, and the resulting "figure" can be applied to any 3D model, letting any model recreate my movements.

Fun! That capture session was such a great experience. My favorite photo of it is still this one below - I look so relaxed and happy~

But back to the original topic. So I'd have, for example, a 3D scan of myself, which I could dress in an outfit and run an animation with the clothing following my movements mostly realistically. The results would be passed on to my colleagues for their projects, and often I would find myself saving generated meshes of the same pattern on dozens of different bodies for comparison purposes. Someday we may see a new and improved version of DRAPE due to my work on this project! Probably not for another year, though - I mainly did the preliminary work of establishing a catalogue of garments for use, and now it needs to come together with a new type of body model, manner of representing cloth in the digital space, and many other considerations besides. When it does happen, however, I'll be able to say that I was a coauthor on a scientific publication - how cool is that?

And there we go - just about the most concise summary of my former job I can come up with. As a fashion designer by trade, this job enabled me to work in a more abstract way than the purely physical training I received, and it was a challenging, variable, and fun job. I learned a lot not only about Computer-Aided Design and scanning systems, but arguably more important things such as working in a team, getting tasks done properly and on time, and staying organized. I couldn't have had a better experience at my first place of employment!

If anything's unclear or there are details you'd like to know, drop me a comment - I'd love to hear from you!