AI & 3D by Bart Sakwerda

WHO

BUDOTS MEDIA PH
BART SAKWERDA

BART SAKWERDA

Bart Sakwerda is Budots Media (Wikipedia). He founded the studio in 2014 in Cebu, during the rehabilitation after Typhoon Haiyan, first in Budlaan and Banilad, then from 2015 in Maribago, Lapu-Lapu City. From 2016 to 2020 the studio also worked out of London (Hackney, then Camden High Street), and since 2023 it has worked with clients in Saudi Arabia.

His work runs from the air to the screen: drone surveys and photogrammetry from Riyadh, Dubai and Singapore to Malaysia and Palawan; Gaussian splats for marine biology and of Thailand; projects for the Department of Tourism in Central Visayas (FMA7, RIDE7, DIVE7). Since 2024 the focus is games: Isda, the browser fishing game of a Philippine barangay, and LapuLapu – The Game.

AI runs through all of it, as a tool rather than the product: models for Filipino languages, 3D generated from images, world models, and code. Isda and this website were developed with AI coding assistants.

GEN

GENERATIONS & MODELS

WORLD MODELS

Worlds you walk into

Real-time interactive worlds from world models such as HY-World 1.5 in the reel above, walked through with the keyboard: a first step from a picture to a place.

3D GENERATION

From a photo to a model

A tropical island generated from one image with Hunyuan 3D 2.5, on Sketchfab to turn round in your browser.

LANGUAGE

FilipinoGPT, BudotsGPT

LoRA finetunes of open models for Tagalog, Cebuano and Taglish, the way Filipinos really write. More on the GenAI page.

DIFFUSION

Diffusion in real time

Experiments with image and video diffusion fast enough to respond live, frame by frame.

CHARACTERS

Rigged and moving

Characters rigged for animation: Lapu-Lapu's rig for the game, an eskrimador for Filipino martial arts.

DIGITAL HUMANS

MetaHumans from photos

Research face models measure public photos; Epic's MetaHuman Creator turns the result into rigged digital humans. Photo to MetaHuman, a work log.

CODE

Games written with AI

Isda, built on the open-source Tidewater engine, was developed with AI coding assistants: its barangay, its boats and people, its phone controls. The studio on GitHub.