Samuel Tan
I build tools to make things I can feel but can't yet say. Most of them end up being useful to someone else too.
sam@samtan.design
case study
garment_gen
Built in Houdini
A friend studying fashion and I both used pattern making software and hit the same wall. Powerful tools, but they ask you to think like a patternmaker before you can think like a designer. He introduced me to the sloper, the foundational pattern every garment starts from, derived from body measurements with everything else following from that. Garments already have a procedural system underneath them. I built a tool that applies the same logic anyone can use that's stable enough to build further on.
Method A
Ray SOP panel projection worked, but it had a ceiling. The garment lived in world space, so any change to the avatar broke it. And placing the inputs correctly required garment knowledge the tool was meant to remove.
Method B
Geodesic body encoding solved both. Landmarks anyone already knows, and a garment that adapts to whatever it's placed on.
Drop in your avatar, place intuitive landmarks, start designing
Reflection
Method A required knowing where garments are constructed before you could design one. Method B replaced that with what designers already know about the body. Both methods informed what the tool needed to be, technically robust, but intuitive enough to stay out of the way. By grounding the system in what people already know, the simpler input and the most structurally sound approach were always the same decision.
tool
eigengrasp
Most creative tools assume you know what you want before you start. Eigengrasp surfaces it first, finding the load-bearing structure of any domain before building begins. Built to establish shared ground truth between human and AI collaborators, before prompting, before anything.
project
pill organizer
A self-directed brief for a pill organizer in the $20–30 range, designed for people who take their health seriously but want objects that reflect their taste. Explored bi-stable hinges, magnetic lids, removable containers, and slide-out forms across multiple sketch iterations. Material studies in wood, metal, and plastic. Two directions, one minimal, one modular.
RecognitionAntoni Tudisco · Aus Taylor