2019

Mesh.ByFace

Turning Dynamo into a selfie machine, with the Hackstreet Boys

The Mesh.ByFace pipeline: four coloured 3D face meshes, the webcam node in Dynamo, a landmark-tracked selfie and the point-cloud graph
The full pipeline

At the inaugural Dynamo Hackathon, I organised a team from four different architectural practices — Ben Robinson (Hawkins\Brown), Mauro Sabiu (Zaha Hadid Architects), Mikael Santrolli (Foster + Partners) and me (AHMM). We called ourselves the Hackstreet Boys, and our goal was to build something technologically ambitious while having as much fun as legally possible.

The pipeline, built in one caffeinated sprint with help from Luke and Keith of the Dynamo development team: a live webcam node written in C# with AForge.NET, PyTorch face-alignment extracting 68 facial landmarks from your selfie, a morphable face model reshaping a neutral 3D mesh to match, pixel colours mapped onto the mesh triangles — and a Tweepy node live-tweeting the result, because obviously.

We came third — and won a special prize for being the most fun team at the event. The Dynamo team published a write-up of the whole glorious mess. #BIMSelfie