Try it live Description
The project starts from the thought that meaningful moments rarely announce themselves. As international students living in the United States, the team often feels care most clearly through everyday messages from people far away. Asking whether someone has eaten, sharing a photo or sending a silly update can say as much as a birthday wish. They wanted to keep these exchanges as they are: ordinary to others, precious to the people in them. It is a gift for people whose love language is sending weird little things.
Doodad on the Loose turns chat screenshots and text messages into small, strange collectible 3D objects. Each object captures one concrete detail from a conversation and gives it an absurd twist. They serve little practical purpose, but the people who shared the conversation can recognize what they mean. The visual direction draws on handmade needle-felt objects: compact shapes, soft edges, restrained colors and tactile wool surfaces, so the results feel slightly awkward and approachable. Comparing settings on the same prompt showed that high-resolution textures matter most for a convincing wool surface.
The current prototype connects this generation pipeline to the app: send a message or a screenshot, receive a felt object, and collect it on a small planet you can share. For the hackathon's gift theme, the team wanted to make room for moments that rarely become gifts. These exchanges don't need to become milestones to deserve a place in our lives; sometimes a small, useless object is enough to remember that someone was thinking of us.
How Tripo was used
Tripo makes every gift.
- Text-to-3D: GPT-5.5 reads the chat and describes one silly object, and Tripo text-to-3D (model v3.1, texture v3.5) builds it. The mossy planet model was generated with Tripo as well.
- Keeping it woolly: every prompt is wrapped in a fixed needle-felt description with a negative prompt, and words like "gold" or "glass" that tended to break the felt look are swapped out. Same-seed tests showed that texture v3.5 with delight gave the most convincing fibers.
- Each model then lands on a little three.js planet you can share via a link.
