As part of our ongoing ‘Ask the Experts’ series, we have brought together some of the Fashion industry’s leading Digital Transformation specialists to answer your most pressing questions. Today, in our penultimate piece of the series, we ask the team: how and why should we be maintaining consistency between 3D assets?
Here’s what they had to say…
Before building any digital creation process that will produce assets, your first step should be to ask the following questions:
- What business processes will be using the assets?
- What business problems will be solved with the assets?
- How will the assets be used across the organisation?
As you ask these questions, be sure to consider end-users who may be outside of your own functional silo. Are you working in design or product development? If so, will you have teams in sales, marketing, and e-commerce that will also be using your assets?
I recently attended a conference where the Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade, etc) digital creation team presented their process; while the Coach assets were originally created for design and merchandising decision-making, they were also being used for marketing, retail, social media teams, and even in games like Roblox! In all these cases, the downstream users were eager to gain access to these high quality 3D files because they were highly accurate, digital twins of the real, physical Coach handbags. This made them highly desirable to represent the product in ways that the original creators may have never imagined.
This was a great example of how one team, by building to standards that ensured a very detailed and accurate product representation, solved problems across their organisation.
How did they ensure consistency? By creating standards in the following areas:
- Modelling and Simulation Standards – How will the model geometry be created? Is it detailed enough? Does it have enough resolution to show every product feature?
- Material Standards – Is the actual product material accurate and scanned with a high-quality scanner? Are all required 3D maps present? Are metal trims faithfully represented?
- Rendering Standards – Is the asset capable of being rendered to e-commerce photo standards? Does a low resolution version need to be created for gaming and AR experience?
While it may be tempting to build content in your company so that it serves a single purpose, the reality is that digital creation assets can provide a goldmine of benefits to an organisation if crafted to a high degree of quality with reusability in mind.
Joshua will be speaking at Stride in Portland next year. Click here to find out more.
Years ago, when standardising CAD Textile Files and Colour Standards, I was famous for saying “we begin with the end in mind.” How else could we push 60,000 pieces of art through 3 CAD systems and printers in 8 weeks?
The same rule applies to 3D assets.
I feel like we are in the same place with 3D that we found ourselves with Adobe years ago; everybody knows a little, and gets work done, but are the file formats the best they can be to save storage space, and to allow any other user to pick them up and begin work where another person left off?
Show me a true pattern maker/product engineer who uses ONLY ONE 3D application for avatar creation, and ONLY ONE 3D patternmaking application.
Product engineers want to and do use a variety of tools. They are engineering product, not just short order clothing cooks. And interoperability between systems remains a big issue.
There are many things we are continuing to improve in our work at Differently Enabled:
- How fabrics are scanned matters. What settings serve you best? What file formats are compatible with the software application(s) you are using?
- With avatars, we have learned that no avatar is created equally. And as you have probably heard me say, the tech is biased against people living with disabilities. So we push avatars through multiple applications until they are correct.
- We are constantly trialling new software, and it should come as no surprise that every application handles things differently,
At the end of it all, your best practice process is unique to your company, your tech stack, and your user community’s skill set and experience.
Don’t be afraid to collaborate. Call your network of peers, or hire some of the consultants on this panel, to help you map out your best practice to give you the consistency you need in workflow and output. Document and train this once you’ve mastered it for your brand.
3D is still a journey for everyone!
Find Craig here.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with this situation: different people, in different teams, create 3D assets of different quality levels OR some teams only use 3D to replace the paper mock-up, while other teams use 3D all the way to wholesale.
The most basic way to maintain consistency between 3D assets is to:
- first define what quality is needed across the board
- Then, make sure that everyone working in 3D is capable of achieving the necessary quality
- Lastly, set up guidelines and libraries so that new people coming into the company or the pipeline can follow the same standards.
Is this oversimplifying the process? Sure, because it can be tough to figure out what the end goal is and which quality is both needed and possible at that stage in the process.
It can take great effort to get everyone trained up to the same level. Setting guidelines and creating libraries can take a while if it’s done next to daily business, but freeing up people to do it full-time is hard, and hiring people on top is expensive.
However, in the end, having consistency in your 3D assets is so worth it, because you can use well-created assets over and over again, for years and for different use cases.
Having inconsistent assets costs you in the long run, because work keeps having to be re-done for new seasons and use cases. The most important step is to define what’s needed; everything else can be done over time.
Find Sophie here.
Sophie-Therese will be speaking at Supply Chain Forum in Berlin on 3-4 December 2024. Click here to find out more.
As you scale your DPC efforts across the organisation, you will inevitably face the situation of multiple teams, internal and external, creating assets that will need to look consistent and meet the high quality standards your brand teams expect. Maintaining this consistency for footwear is a very different challenge than doing so for your apparel line.
For apparel, as long as you commit to a consistent toolset and workflow, which will greatly depend on the authoring software, and have a clear quality standards document and solid material digitization pipeline, achieving this consistency should be a matter of clear communication and review process.
For footwear, however, the asset creation workflows are a lot less standardised and there are multiple proven paths to creating 3D footwear assets. Because, except for a handful of very specialised software packages, there is little correlation between 3D upper patterns and their 2D counterparts, and because these 3D files are rarely used for the production of non-molded or non-3D printed components, there is less pressure on 3D artists to align their workflows. It is, however, incredibly important for the consistency of the final assets and the scalability of the process to ensure that every footwear asset is built following a consistent S.O.P. (standard operating procedure).
If you are at a point where you have to worry about consistency, it means that you have multiple pipelines contributing to your seasonal offering, which is, in and of itself, a great milestone.
Make sure you remember to celebrate each one of them!
Find Safir here.
Safir will be joining us as a speaker at Stride on 11-12 March 2025 in Portland. To find out more, click here.
For consistency across 3D assets in apparel, I am a broken record: comprehensive patternmaking knowledge is critical.
The best starting point is consistency of the tools used to build the assets. Fit avatars and block patterns should be built in harmony; this is an untapped resource for most. The avatar should have precisely indicated landmarks AND those landmarks should be placed based on measurements taken to draft the patterns from scratch. These may or may not be the same as points of measure used to evaluate the physical proto. Those landmarks from the block patterns can be carried over to styles. When in digital, it becomes VERY easy to align the x and y of the garment with the x and y of the body.
This is a win for fit, balance, and consistency across the board.
The next big opportunity for maintaining consistency is creating well-vetted digital standards. Please read Ask The Experts: 3D Workmanship Standards. Once the standards have been established, build in accountability for all parties. This is a tough step but made easier if the standards are purpose built, inclusive, and meet the needs of the audience.
Create the standards with a “Lean” mindset. Start small, test and adjust. Accountability should be built into the process gradually, particularly if accountability is not already a central pillar in your organization. Accountability could be evaluations that score assets, shared whiteboards, or regular micro presentations of work completed.
My last bit of advice for maintaining consistency is to plan for growth and change. Digital tools will continue to evolve and we should stay prepared to easily integrate winning innovation. Build sustainable plans for tool training instead of relying on tool providers to dictate how your teammates learn. Prioritize ease of consumption over ease of creation for content and documents. With foundational principles and practices in place, tools can change with minimal disruption to bigger organizational goals.
Find Christian here.
