About me section time. I went looking at how other people do theirs and it’s always the same move: a nice portrait photo, big and confident. which is a problem for me because… I don’t have a single cool picture of myself lol. i’m a bit camera shy and every photo i have looks like a hostage situation.

So instead of just taking a better photo like a normal person, my brain went “why not 3d scan your face?”. found out you can do it with just a phone camera, downloaded polycam, walked around my own head like an idiot for 10 minutes and… it looked TERRIBLE. like melted wax figure terrible. i felt genuinely bad about it ngl.

So i did what i always do when i feel bad: dumb scrolling through awwwards sites of the day. and one of them saved me — a site with a 3d face made entirely of particles. no skin, no texture, just points floating in space. that was it.

Plain particles were kinda monotonous though, everything just sat there dead still. so i ran curl noise over the cloud and now the whole surface drifts like it’s breathing. instant life.

of course nothing works first try. my first version had a depth test problem where the BACK of my head was blending through my face, so i had eyes and hair occupying the same pixels :)). ended up going into blender and rendering out a depth image of just the front of my face, then rebuilt the 3d from that depth map instead of the raw scan. each particle samples the portrait for its position, brightness and size, and instead of a real depth-of-field pass i just fade particles the further they sit from a focus plane — looks like bokeh, costs nothing.

The section hooks into the opening sequence from #2: the shutter bar squares up, expands out to the screen edges and opens straight onto the face. dither background fades itself out on the way so the particles get a clean dark void to float in.