The 3D prototype is complete. HVNS leans over his latest creation, fingers tracing its contours, adjusting button placements and testing its tactile response.
Every click, rotation, and physical interaction feeds into his obsession with designing items that are functional as they are easy on the eyes. This is where digital imagination meets physical reality. This is where he thrives.
As a 3D artist, he doesn’t just design objects on a screen. He experiments and iterates, making every surface and curve serve a thoughtful purpose. All ideas leading to a refined product that makes the workflow feel intuitive and human centered.
THE PATH TO PIXELS
Growing up in Kaimuki, Takuma Kinoshita (aka HVNS), developed early skills for form, texture, and visual rhythm, having filled notebooks with sketches and graffiti lettering. One could say the art of making something almost runs through his veins. His mother was a custom dress maker, and his father a woodworker and cabinet maker.
“Growing up I spent a lot of time in my mom’s studio, watching her sew and design dresses for clients,” he reflects. “Then I would be at my dad’s workshop and help him build furniture, and we would do little weekend projects together like building skateboards, or custom aluminum shells for my RC car. That’s where I really started to appreciate creating things in a physical sense.”
The Kalani High School alum initially pursued music, moving to Japan to study at Shobi Music College. He graduated in 2012 with a degree in Composition & Arrangement and continued making music throughout this period, while beginning to explore video editing and graphic design to create his own album artwork and visuals.
In 2013, a single moment sharpened that interest. After seeing FKA twigs’ “Water Me” music video, he became fixated on its minimalistic, surreal imagery, particularly the closing sequence where a 3D-animated teardrop appears as the emotional climax of the video.
Wanting to recreate that kind of visual language for his own music, he downloaded the 3D software Cinema 4D and taught himself how to rebuild the animation beat by beat. He was still composing and producing music but increasingly exploring how sound and image intersect. That musical background played a key part in shaping his taste, particularly his sense of rhythm, pacing, and restraint.
Eventually those skills led to a role at the local music media company and radio station, block.fm, where he began with video editing and grew into broader creative direction and visual design responsibilities. He has no formal training in 3D, relying instead on YouTube tutorials, forums, Discord communities, and online courses.
He sees his relationship with digital and physical art as something that has shifted over time. Early in his career, he was deeply drawn to digital creation, an interest that coincided with living in Tokyo and being immersed in contemporary art, fashion, and a faster, more consumer-driven creative culture. The digital realm felt expansive and limitless, and that openness shaped much of his work during that period.
As he’s gotten older, his focus has moved increasingly toward physical art. He became more interested in creative boundaries, utility, and practicality, and how working with physical materials forces restraint and intention.
This shift has also aligned with a deeper connection to traditional Japanese craftsmanship and artisan culture, contrasting the rapid, iterative pace of the work he was doing in Tokyo. That return to physicality and traditional Eastern sensibilities has become one of the strongest influences on his recent work.
Recent physical objects he’s designed include a game controller, desk lamps, and meditation devices. All of them with the same combined intention of utility and aesthetic appeal. Today he continues iteration, slowly but surely increasing their utility.
INSIDE THE LAB
He runs both hvns.lab, his personal design and art project that serves as his primary creative canvas, and a freelance design business that includes graphic design, video editing, motion graphics, and 3D art.
His design ideas operate as a simultaneous exploration of what feels useful in his adult life, and a reconnection with the sense of awe and curiosity he experienced as a child.
Projects often begin as practical solutions, but gradually evolve into questions of form, as aesthetics begin to take on equal importance. For example, after growing frustrated with the keyboard and mouse being the default input methods for 3D software, he designed a custom 3D-printed game controller as an alternative interface. Its design is shaped by an early fascination with peripherals, modular add-ons, and physical interfaces.
The same logic applies to his custom meditation device. Meditation is a core part of his daily routine, and he wanted a way to practice without apps, notifications, or screens. The device also became an exploration of what makes an object feel special rather than disposable, a sense of rarity and magic he associates with certain objects from childhood, and finds largely absent in modern mass-produced technology.
“I just like the idea of things being tactile, weighted, and fully customized to me,” he says. His entire process is a layered workflow, tapping into functionality, aesthetics, and pragmatics until the final creation satisfies both engineering and artistic standards.
He jokingly praises the 3D software Blender as “probably the greatest innovation humankind has ever produced,” lauding its all-in-one reliability in modeling, animation, sculpting, and rendering, all within a free and open-source environment. “Beyond working as well as it does, it competes with any other professional software, and I just really like the ethos of Blender as a company.”
CULTURE, CRAFT, AND CODE
Regular family visits to Osaka during his youth exposed him to different cultural and environmental perspectives. Opposite of Hawaiʻi’s slower-paced, calm of a paradise, HVNS grew fascinated with a metropolitan, cutting-edge urban lifestyle.
He spent over a decade living and working in Tokyo, immersed in contemporary art, digital culture, and creative production. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, that immersion coincided with a period of creative burnout after years of working at a fast, highly digital pace.
The disruption created space to step back, and he chose to leave Tokyo and move to Yamanashi in search of a reset. Living closer to mountains, lakes, and forests shifted him toward a slower rhythm of daily life. One that felt closer to the pace and natural environment he grew up with in Hawaiʻi.
“I guess when you grow up in it, you don’t really understand what your environment actually is, because that’s the only lens you’re seeing through. That’s all you know,” he says.
Living in Japan and spending time in the countryside, especially being exposed to Shinto ideas around nature, gave him a new reference point. Now, when he comes home, he takes in the scenery more deliberately and notices things he didn’t before.
“Japan helped me realize how much of a mountain person I am. I love coming back to Hawaiʻi and exploring, and I’m especially drawn to the windward side of the island. The mountains, and the way the streams carve through the landscape are really beautiful.”
These experiences helped shape his approach to his art having lived in the dichotomy of both worlds, greatly informing his creative ethos. That includes putting emphasis on process over immediate results. To put it plainly, ideas alone don’t equal great art.
“There’s this naïveté in thinking that once the technical barriers are removed, anyone with a good idea can immediately operate at the level of experienced artists,” he says. “Ideas are important but what becomes clear, especially as AI accelerates, is that most first ideas are actually quite obvious. They’re familiar, predictable, and easy to arrive at.”
For him, the real work happens in what he sees as a creative gauntlet. “You only get to the interesting ideas by moving through a lot of bad ones first. Repetition, experimentation, and time spent with the tool slowly strip away the common answers. That process is what forges the stronger ideas.”
In that sense, generative AI hasn’t lowered the bar as much as it exposed what’s actually valuable. “Giving everyone the ability to produce technically proficient work has shown how many ideas tend to be unoriginal or surface level,” he says. “The misconception is that typing the right prompt makes you an artist. But it’s not about producing more, or being faster. It’s about developing taste, judgment, and the discipline to leave most ideas behind, until you have something special.”
The best use of AI, HVNS says, is in streamlining tasks. When applied thoughtfully, it allows artists to spend more time on problem solving, experimentation, and innovation.
“The utilitarian usefulness of AI is what I’m most interested in,” he says. “Within design, there are parts of the workflow where it makes sense to let AI handle the mundane work, the things you don’t want to spend hours on, so you can focus on the creative and artistic parts. We should be saving the fun parts for ourselves instead of outsourcing them. That’s what feels genuinely exciting to me about AI.”
THE LONG GAME
Even as the use of AI rises, artists now and beyond should keep the love of their craft the main focal point, as opposed to their intended outcome.
“Start with really loving something and get obsessed with it, everything is downstream of that obsession,” he says. “If you just love it so much that you have no choice but to learn a tool or a craft to actualize that idea, it’ll fall in place.”
For HVNS, that idea is a gamut of art mediums but one stands out among the rest. “3D art sits in that sweet spot of being close enough to reality where there are a lot of practical aspects to it and can be useful. It’s also accessible with the available digital software tools to where I can explore the abstract and form in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to do with purely physical tools. I just love that aspect of it.”
It’s that creative juice that makes any artist bring their own magic and wonder. As HVNS puts it, “It’s like having my own little world that I can create and carry around. A world that I can access, put away, then revisit and build upon, iterate, and tinker with. It’s such an interesting and fun way to express my ideas in a way that other art forms haven’t necessarily scratched that itch the way that 3D does.”
3D is not just a form of art. It’s a way to shape ideas, environments, and experiences that resonate beyond the screen. For HVNS, success means dedicating everything you’ve got to the craft.
“I would feel successful if I felt like I maximized my potential. To know instinctively that I left a body of work that I’m proud of and that I put the amount of time and effort into it that I wanted to. That I made the most of my time and expressed to the fullest extent of [my capabilities].”
The tools may change, and the forms may evolve. But the motion remains the same: hands engaged, curiosity intact, the world still unfolding.