I started my career from a passion I cultivated for cinema, drawing and sculpting and after some production art experience, moved onto the technical side of things.
For the last 13 years, I’ve been building tools for artists at the highest levels of feature animation and VFX. As a lead technical director on the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, my team built the tools that redefined the unique animation style and visual language of animated films we often see reproduced nowadays. After my experience at Sony, I more recently contributed to the cutting edge of computer graphics at Netflix Eyeline Labs and published research in top-tier journals and conferences like ACM TOG and SIGGRAPH.
I recently decided that some of the weekend projects I have been tinkering with on the side, can bring some joy to others, so I decided to start galata.ink. One of these projects I called tamga, is a 3D sculpting, sketching, and stylized rendering app… It is written with latest web technologies as well as languages and toolchains specific for Apple’s iPad ecosystem. It is designed and polished for an iPad while being accessible from any recent enough device with a web browser and a big enough display (my preferred baseline is iPad mini display). iPad version is out today and I hope you may try at least the existing web and or desktop versions.
tamga, tries to solve software-operator + artist fatigue… A lot of the tools for digital artists demand the user to not only be good artists or have taste but also learn complicated set of buttons designed by and for an engineer. The tools can and will never come close to pen and paper or a piece of earth. This is true not only because of their inherent simplicity vs complexity but also people designing the digital art tools are not trying (most of the time) to make simple and out of the way user experiences. I want to contribute to try and change 3d user interfaces too, hopefully for the better. I placed a lot of intention and attention into tamga to feel out of the way of the artist. I hope it shows.
If you end up trying and have some feedback, please respond to let me know.
I am Ahmet Levent Taşel.
I started my career from a passion I cultivated for cinema, drawing and sculpting and after some production art experience, moved onto the technical side of things.
For the last 13 years, I’ve been building tools for artists at the highest levels of feature animation and VFX. As a lead technical director on the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, my team built the tools that redefined the unique animation style and visual language of animated films we often see reproduced nowadays. After my experience at Sony, I more recently contributed to the cutting edge of computer graphics at Netflix Eyeline Labs and published research in top-tier journals and conferences like ACM TOG and SIGGRAPH.
I recently decided that some of the weekend projects I have been tinkering with on the side, can bring some joy to others, so I decided to start galata.ink. One of these projects I called tamga, is a 3D sculpting, sketching, and stylized rendering app… It is written with latest web technologies as well as languages and toolchains specific for Apple’s iPad ecosystem. It is designed and polished for an iPad while being accessible from any recent enough device with a web browser and a big enough display (my preferred baseline is iPad mini display). iPad version is out today and I hope you may try at least the existing web and or desktop versions.
tamga, tries to solve software-operator + artist fatigue… A lot of the tools for digital artists demand the user to not only be good artists or have taste but also learn complicated set of buttons designed by and for an engineer. The tools can and will never come close to pen and paper or a piece of earth. This is true not only because of their inherent simplicity vs complexity but also people designing the digital art tools are not trying (most of the time) to make simple and out of the way user experiences. I want to contribute to try and change 3d user interfaces too, hopefully for the better. I placed a lot of intention and attention into tamga to feel out of the way of the artist. I hope it shows.
If you end up trying and have some feedback, please respond to let me know.