NEW 3D Portfolio LAUNCH 400+ Hours! - Garrett Larson

LAUNCH VIDEO:

https://www.garrettwlarson.com/

After over 400 hours of work during my final semester of college—balancing the demands of starting a company, playing in bands, and staying sane—I’m thrilled to release version 1.0 of my 3D Portfolio to the world! This project has been in the works for over two years, ever since I discovered Bruno Simon’s incredible toy truck resume.

As a kid, I grew up playing classic N64 games like Donkey Kong 64 and Super Mario 64. While these games were a huge source of inspiration, I tried to put my own unique twist on the concept. Though I’ve envisioned this project for years, official development kicked off in October 2024. Nearly every model in the scene was built from scratch in Blender and imported into the project using THREE.js. The scene itself is animated and controlled with JavaScript, with the help of animation libraries like GSAP, all organized using a singleton design pattern. Eventually, I plan to transition the project to React Three Fiber.

Every mini-game was developed from the ground up, and most of the assets were created in Photoshop or Procreate. I composed the background music and dance tracks in Logic Pro X. I even incorporated my 2020-2029 decade mural, showing off physical scanned illustrations originally created with markers and colored pencils. In the music room, you can explore and demo tracks from all the bands I’ve been able to perform and record with over the years.

This entire project has been a massive undertaking, and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out. I plan to keep updating it as my hobbies, skills, and artistic vision continue to evolve. Thank you for visiting—enjoy your stay!

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You might want to post a link to it.

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Nice catch! Thanks

Stuff I like

  • I like the attention to detail, like the loading bear’s head following your mouse

  • Looks good and consistent

  • I like how the walls disappear depending on camera angle

Criticism

  • Loading time is way too high. Even loading the index.html file takes more than 5sec in an incognito window, and my internet connection is fine. Looks like you’re using Vercel, maybe you have some server side stuff happening that’s slowing things down?

  • I can’t climb the stairs on the left side (after coming in through the door, i have to use the right side of the stairs).

  • The UX isn’t great. If I want your contact details, I would rather get them straight away by clicking on ‘Contact’ instead of having to figure out that I need to walk up to it.

  • While it’s a cool project, I would make it launch from a link within a traditional HTML page, with a more standard portfolio that clearly lists your experience and abilities. In its current state, it might impress recruiters, but that’s only if they don’t get put off by the load time and the UX issues. Remember that recruiters are usually not coders, they want to get info about you as quickly as possible, and won’t be impressed by the same things as people in this forum. Show them you’ve thought about your users first and they’ll be way more likely to hire you. Until the site is loaded and they’ve started walking around, all they know is that it’s a ‘website created by garret larson’. If I need a React developer who’s familiar with deploying on AWS, I’ll stop there and go look at those portfolios that clearly show what applicants can do.

It’s solid man, I like it.

I wouldn’t worry about the feedback above^, unless he can prove he’s done much better.

I had a great time on it.

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thats a great job!