SoHo Crosby Street Cat

Inspiration

My technical inspiration was to learn how to make a custom landmark. Each time I passed by the gigantic black cat sculpture on Crosby Street in SoHo NY, I thought this suave looking cat has undiscovered potential to be a fashion mannequin. And that was my overall inspiration.

What it does

The lens adorns the cat sculpture with scarves, which move with flair and flow. The user can switch between scarves.

How we built it

I used Custom Location Creator Lens to scan the big black cat sculpture on Crosby Street.

I used cloth simulation for the scarves, which I made out of simple meshes in Blender. To ensure the scarf cloth doesn't cut through itself and to give the desired movements to scarves, I used vertex painting to simulate different parts of the mesh separately.

Challenges we ran into

The time-consuming part was making the occluder: 1- I could not go to the landmark often enough to get a clean scan that can be used as an occluder as is. 2- Furthermore, the cat sculpture is shiny which Lens Studio documents does not recommend as a custom landmark.

Therefore, to make an acceptable occluder (which does not show the scarf through the cat sculpture), I used Blender: I combined multiple scans I made with Lens Studio Custom Location Creator Lens; and I created meshes for the missing parts of the scans.

I lost good amount of time to body segmentation which was detecting the cat’s body parts as human and interfering with my content. Not using body segmentation works nicely for back camera (people passing by the sculpture do not cut through the scarves).

The spiky ears of the cat were another challenge. The occluder from the scan right now occludes ears not exactly how I wish and therefore impacting the 'wrapped around' look I aim for the scarf.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the desired cloth movements and flows and the intended scarf look just by simple meshes for scarves but using the appropriate vertex bindings, vertex simulation and colliders.

My goals for scarves were:

• Cloth not breaking into itself
• Cloth moving in intended shapes and flair
• To have them pass over the spiky ears of the cat
• Scarves to look flowy and silky, but around the neck to look like a ruff (collar) as in the paintings of old Dutch masters.

What we learned

Making custom landmarks and working with cloth simulation. And gained high-level respect for occluders. :-)

What's next for SoHo Crosby Street Cat

This cat located in SoHo where people come for fashion shopping can be used to showcase designers’ scarves. I would like to extend this project to add jewelry, shoes, shirts and hats for fashion brands to demonstrate their new designs.

Afterall, this cat is a natural-born fashion model! :-)

In terms of custom landmark scanning, I will add more perspectives. Right now, it works when facing the face of the cat which is sufficient for the scarf modeling. I will also extend scanning for different light conditions (right now it doesn't work in the evenings). When improving the scan; I will also update the occluder to do a smoother look around the corners.

Built With

• blender
• javascript
• lensstudio