Projects with Play Patterns

Lightsabers - Prop Design

I went a little over the top with some Christmas presents for my 9 and 10 year old sisters. I decided to learn prop making techniques and designed, 3d printed, and painted these two lightsabers. Geometry designed in Onshape, Details added in Blender. A combination of Resin and FDM printing.

One lightsaber is Art Deco inspired (GOLD) featuring winged sun and planetary elements, gold embossing in ivory, while the other is Art Nouveau inspired; whiplash curves and organic elements in verdigris copper.

I also modified the circuitry to drive haptic motors according to the sound amplitudes generated from the internal speakers. The play pattern for this project is of course, training to become a Jedi Knight, and my sisters are well on their way to mastery.

Monster Mixer - Beast Baker

Mix and Match Your Monster Molds, to create the ultimate beast! Tentacle Hands and Wolf Feet! Dragon Head and Robo-Arms! the possibilities are endless! Bake your beast into your own solid toy, a quick paint job and your ready for battle!

This project was a blast, Sam Santos, Connor Charlton and I worked on as a small project for our toy design course in university. inspired by the easy bake oven, and those creature creator flip books, sometimes its nice to mix and match play patterns to see what happens. This Product combines Arts & Crafts with Imaginative Role Play

3d Scanned Chess

I am gradually 3d scanning my family members and making us 3d printed chess pieces. Wouldn't it be awesome if you were the chess piece?

This connection to the pieces alters the game based play pattern of chess to somewhat of a role play or imaginative play, where kids act out their chess pieces.

I am intrigued by the role film, books, and television have in play patterns. My siblings and I learned chess because of the life size wizard chess scenes in the harry potter films and books, so in this way our imaginations are stimulated and eagerness overcomes any challenge of learning the rules.

Cornel Theme Park Competition

During The spring of 2021; Patrick Cusimano, Emily Torres and Myself entered the Cornell Theme Park design competition and won first place over all, as well as additional prizes for best flat-ride, and best water-ride designs. We collaborated as a team in a total virtual setting, and utilized online tools like Miro and Zoom to communicate.

My main Contributions were the alien abduction flat-ride, building and rendering the virtual park (and various buildings in it) in Unreal Engine, as well as other rendering, photoshop, and illustrator layout work.

The Alien Abduction Ride had a unique play pattern, where users would actually have some control over the movement and lights of the ride. while the larger motions would be automated, each pilot could tilt and aim the tractor ray to beam up their friends on the grounds below. a scoreboard would be kept and pilots would compete to break the record of most abductions.

Design For Manufacturing

Hyrofoiling Surfboard Remote Iteration - IP67

I was heavily involved and responsible for helping the client move manufacturing to North America, and getting molding organized, materials sourced, and troubleshooting issues. I also worked to design their suggested to iterate on the past designs, improving ergonomics and functionality.

Design for manufacturing
Drawings & DDS
Coordinatizing Injection molding, reviewing tooling, sourcing materials
Troubleshooting molding, diagnosing issues and leak paths coming up with solutions, waterproofing testing, obtaining proper materials to resolve issues

Vehicle Control Unit - IP67 Enclosure

While at Engineering Design Lab we developed our own product, a micro computer to be the brains of small electric vehicles. My main responsibility here required designing an IP67 Waterproof enclosure, and working closely with the electronics team's board iterations. I was able to take this project all the way from concept to injection molding, This project involved:

Enclosure Design
Prototyping - 3d Printing
DDS with China, for vacuum casted higher fidelity prototypes
Waterproof testing, and troubleshooting
Design for injection molding
Injection mold tooling overview, identifying tooling issues that may have compromised waterproofness
Consulting with injection molding experts, and recommending tooling changes

Cargo Moped- DFM While Preserving Designers Vision.

COOKEE is an electric cargo moped I had the opportunity to design the chassis for.

I worked closely with the manufacturer to take the clients concept art, and turn it into a manufacturable chassis. Keeping aligned with the client's vision while optimizing for manufacturing was key.
Through this process Engineers mentored me on chassis design, and how to set up Finite Element Analysis (FEA)
We adjusted our design according to FEA results.
Prepared Manufacturing Drawings and Cust List (DDS)

FEA animation shows effects at 20x (for visualization purposes)

Innovating new processes:

My greatest skill is innovating new workflows to solve problems I see around me. I love to explore new technologies and bring them together across disciplines, to solve problems with novel experimental solutions. Below are some examples of these discoveries:

I Developed A Modular Vehicle Simulator!

A Virtual Prototyping Method For Mechanism Kinematics.

While working at Engineering Design Lab, we had issues with small scale vehicle prototypes because they were not very representative of the full scale vehicle dynamics, However large scale prototyping is time consuming and cost intensive to modify.

I felt we needed a way to test the fundamental design, beyond calculations, we needed an intuitive drivable experience for testing mechanisms before committing to manufacturing. Something more representative than Lego or 3d printed desktop models.

After evaluating on how little software was available to accomplish this, I learned how to push blender beyond its limits, using AI to write custom scripts for additional functionality, and developed a method to simulate any vehicle or mechanism, in a Realtime environment that could be piloted with an Xbox controller.

I also noticed the autonomous team was unable to develop and test their algorithms while the vehicle was not operational, so I added in virtual sensors, and leveraged AI to write custom scripts to stream sensor data out over the network, also receiving commands from their autonomous algorithms to control the vehicle. This could enable the team to test and refine their autonomous systems before implementing them in the field, or test more extreme scenarios we couldn't afford to risk physically. I Initially built this simulator for the WAL-LE project, and intend to use it in futre projects as well.

WAL-LE: Wheeled Arctic Lander - Low Emissions

I was a key member of a small team that designed and built an amphibious electric vehicle for the Canadian Military in only 5 months. This was a major Project I contributed to at Engineering Design Lab. My responsibilities were:

Concept Design
Small scale prototyping (Lego & 3d Printing)
Chassis CAD & DDS
Applying Feedback From Chassis Manufacturer, Preparing Drawings
Assembly and Testing

Some of this is captured in the WAL-LE design process video below:

The Next Phase: Full scale WAL-LE:

2D Mocap Animation Workflow

Combining Live action, Animation, and Virtual Sets

My theory:

2d animation is expensive because you have to draw every frame of every character.
Live action + CGI is expensive because you have to make everything look perfect with photo realistic detail, and compositing is really difficult to match lighting of characters and virtual objects/environments.
Therefore if you can use AI to convert footage of actors to stylized animation, then you can use stylized environments solving the compositing issue, and only add detail where it is necessary. I implemented this technique on this short film CURSE OF THE WASHERS GUILD.

Throughout the filmmaking process I discovered many new techniques, including adding depth to footage to give more flexibility to camera moves.

Tough Lessons:

This was an extremely ambitious project, and with the freedom to be able to create whatever I could dream up- I got carried away with scope creep, and lost in details. To avoid this on the next film I do I want to:

Time each step in the process
Calculate how long it would take for a given show-length
Evaluate my time and resources with a solid plan of how many hours per week to spend on it.
Execute and evaluate my progress compared to predicted timelines.

I dream of finding an efficient way to make movies with unrestrained vision, I think its just a matter of innovating the right process and keeping disciplined to keep it feasible, and get it done.

Trained Custom AI model on our Actors- Converting Performances to Animation.

Placed Footage on Planes in virtual environments

Final Render of Virtual Set

Virtual Set Design

Illustrations For My Upcoming Novel

A near future Canadian Sci-Fi about an Arctic Ranger and her robot

Bill The Droid: a Character from my Novel

Discovering a new Process for rapidly turning sketches to 3d models

Gwen Riding her Drifthorne - Shepperd of the Tundra

Mine-Hunting Drone Concept

A proposal was submitted to the Department of National Defense under the IDEaS program and is awaiting review.

Capstone Project: Tern Evtol

Solar Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Ultralight Aircraft for Overlanding Adventures

2023 Capstone Project

Go Anywhere | No Obstacles | Any Terrain

Fly | Camp | Solar-Charge | Repeat

User Identity

They enjoy camping, backpacking, world travel, modding and Self reliance. They care about environmental stewardship

Eager to develop adventure skills such as:

navigation
survival
electrical mechanical
operations
piloting
emergency and problem solving

Summer 2022 EVTOL Design Competition

An especially grounding experience was the EVTOL design competition I won in 2022, where I optimized existing technologies to calculate an efficient and convenient design with good range and met ultralight legal requirements. This design competition formed the foundation for the aircraft that became my capstone project.

User Experience Storyboard

identifying vehicle requirements through envisioning circumstances.

Mixed Reality Prototyping Techniques - Half Scale Tent

Using the 3d model I created In Gravity Sketch VR, I was able to look through my headset to trace the geometry onto foam core and cloth. I cut out these shapes, stitched and glued them together to make a prototype to test the feasibility of the concentric folding pop up tent design. This proved to be a simple design that was easily collapsible, and could store in a tight location.