As part of my final year in Republic Polytechnic, I worked on a project named "The Permata Experience". It was focused on a restaurant that had a large emphasis on history and culture of the Kampong Glam and the Nusantara region. Our job was to create marketing material, as well as innovate on their restaurant's dining and customer experience to bring in the younger generation.

Firstly, this interactive projection mapping was created as a way for diners to be fully immersed in the worlds that we had created. Our 3 themes include; Ocean Scene, Old Kampong Glam, and Wayang Kulit. These were meant as a way for customers to enjoy their meal while surrounded by history, to better understand culture through experience.

I created the animation using Blender for 3D animation, as well as Adobe After Effects for 2D animation. After these animations had been put together, they were put through a projector pointing down onto the table, which was then fine tuned using a projection mapping software called Resolume. It was quite difficult to learn the softwares, because I had no prior experience to this project, and on top of that, they were quite complex softwares to learn. 

For this product render, I had taken the dimensions and designs created by one of my teammates; Lily, and then recreated the products in Blender using 3D modelling. Then, I arranged these products, created a lighting setup, and rendered the final image.

Although it may not be perfect, this being one of my first times using Blender, I was very happy with the result in the end. While the projection mapping was the event that got me into using Blender, coming back to do this 3D render allowed my to refine my knowledge as I put what I had learned previously to the test, while also learning about more advanced topics such as lighting, rendering, shading, and compositing.

Looking at the final render, it definitely beats out anything we could have afforded to do in real life. We would have had to book a studio, equipment, and the print out the products. All of this would have taken a lot of money, but in the end it costed us nothing. I think this really made me more interested in 3D modelling as previously, the complexity of the software was an impossible hurdle for me. But now that I have the basic skills, I can comfortably use it and I hope to be able to work on and learn more about 3D in the future.

Look through this image carousel for some behind-the-scenes images! We worked on elaborate studio setups, met some famous people, and even got to have some free food from Permata.

This was a great opportunity to be able to work on a project that I could funnel all of my passion and effort into, and to be able to work with a client that was very generous, and gave us a lot of creative freedom was amazing! I hope that I'll be able to work on projects like this again soon!