Sasmitha Hettiarachchi – Exploring digital fashion and the gaming space

A few years ago, I became a self-taught digital 3D artist, exploring creativity in the realm of digital imagery. With a passion for merging art with technology, most of my digital designs were created by leveraging tools like Blender, CLO3D and Daz Studio.

Later, I found out new opportunities in many different areas within the digital fashion space, such as DPC (Digital Product Creation), fashion animation, DPC for advertising, costumes for games and films, etc. Seeing all that, I decided to pursue my Master’s to explore these different areas and come up with a project that adds value to the digital fashion space, while pushing myself towards the next step of my practice.

During my research for courses, I came across AUB, and after reaching out to them and having a small discussion, I decided to enrol on the MA Digital Fashion Innovation course.

Throughout the course I learned about digital fashion and its applications while exploring new digital fashion practices and software such as designing in VR with Gravity Sketch, digital pattern cutting, economics of digital products, zero waste fashion production and the use of Artificial Intelligence in creative fields, to name a few.

A digital model, facing off to the left, wearing a primarily red dress and mask covering their entire face.

A digital model, facing to the left, wearing a primarily red dress and mask covering their entire face.

A digital model viewed wearing a gold scale-like garment which appears distorted, reflecting red light in all directions.

Digital female figure with her arms raised, wearing a black garment that covers her face and a gold floral embellishment at the chest and on her head.

A virtual reality shoe, viewed from the side facing to the left.

A pair of virtual reality shoes, floating against a plain background, facing inward on a diagonal towards each other.

In my Master’s project, I explore the applications of real-time cloth simulation in the gaming space, and the idea of growing such spaces to a collaborative space between fashion brands, fashion education and a digital fashion economy. With my research into how brands use digital fashion and the future trends of gaming, I built the idea of a collaborative gaming space and the proposed idea of players being able to design and create garments themselves for their playable characters. To unlock this, having real-time cloth simulation is crucial, and my focus was on how to achieve real time cloth simulation within a game engine, specifically with Unreal Engine 5

The University's facilities and access to lot of software, and being able to have one-on-one discussions with our course leader, were central to helping me evolve my digital fashion practice, from generating static 3D renders to exploring dynamic real-time cloth simulation, and it has opened me up to a whole new area of digital fashion research. In addition, I was also able to collaborate with students from multiple creative backgrounds such as animation, photography, etc., while also collaborating with teachers and businesses in The Innovation Studio, which sharpened up my soft skills and work ethic.