Two of apparel’s top 3D tech forces are teaming up to bring garment-on-model visualizations to life and reduce the need for physical sampling among designers, developers and buying teams, ultimately aimimg to facilitate better decision making, communication, collaboration and merchandising. Browzwear has partnered with fellow 3D design technology provider Metail to integrate the latter’s Ecoshot 3D garment-on-model technology into the VStitcher design visualization tool, which is designed to serve as a virtual photo studio.
The two companies have actually been publicly working together for quite some time prior to the official announcement—the integration is the product of a three-year collaboration between Metail and Browzwear followed by an extensive beta testing and review process.
The company’s collaborative efforts have already been tested with key apparel customers, including Puma, Switzerland-based performance sportswear brand Odlo and Otto International, the sourcing division of the Germany-based Otto Group, one of the world’s largest privately owned multi-channel retail groups.
The partnership comes at a time when designers and other parties in the product launch process are working from home throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and companies are still attending digital trade shows in lieu of physical meetings. As such, more detailed 3D options are pivotal in order to get all teams on board with apparel designs and future planning efforts.
“When Covid-19 travel restrictions caused our global 360 Go-To-Market meeting to be switched to a digital event, EcoShot gave us the flexibility to show our 3D garments on real people,” said Bernd Sauer, apparel development director at Puma. “EcoShot helped ensure that our Go-To-Market and Business Units chose to incorporate 3D garments into their virtual merchandise planning for the next season.”
Related Stories
EcoShot’s realistic visualizations are made possible by the combination of VStitcher’s simulation of garment and Metail’s “Scanatars.” The Scanatars are digitized versions of human models, created using 3D body scans, photography and computer vision algorithms.
The EcoShot plugin within VStitcher and Browzwear’s other major 3D design technology, Lotta, is designed to remove the need for what can end up being very time-consuming collaging and Photoshop work for designers, instead helping them and their teams get a quicker sense of what their designs will look like when worn by consumers.
The images generated with EcoShot are aimed at providing more natural looking and inspirational designs compared to the garments shown on avatars alone. From there, users can then request EcoShot Finished Images, which can be used for line review meetings and for presenting to buyers.
“EcoShot images are even more convincing than regular 3D, as customers less distracted by avatars can better accept that this is what the garment will really look like in real life,” said Katharina Bobrowski, general manager of Limited, the virtual product development division of Otto International. “Also great is that, because only approved ideas are turned into physical samples, we save a lot of time as well as the resources we’d otherwise use to make multiple samples for each individual garment.”
Browzwear had made strides to fortify its 3D fashion design offering, partnering with the PVH Europe powered Stitch Accelerator Program earlier this year in April to bring 3D technology to fashion designers. The initiative will work towards Tommy Hilfiger’s goal to achieve a 100 percent digital design flow by 2022.
The next month, Browzwear announced its collaboration with Adobe in May to integrate its Substance 3D texturing and materials authoring technology into both VStitcher and Lotta. The integration is designed for Browzwear users to leverage Substance’s features to create hyper-realistic, ready-for-production print executions quickly and easily.
Following the partnership, Substance by Adobe released more than 100 new assets in its ’20/’21 “Ready-to-Texture” collection. Among the new additions is a selection of woven, knitted and printed textiles that behave in similar ways to their real-life counterparts, including twill, oxford and tweed.
All these integrations led to Browzwear’s most recent digital update launched in June, which alongside the print executions from Adobe also included fully cloud-based rendering, powered by computer-generated imagery software provider V-Ray, as well as a new note-leaving feature where designers can add sketched details using any image editor or drawing tool directly on the 3D style and avatar. Additionally, designers can now transfer designs to new avatars without re-simulating the entire garment.
More than 350 organizations worldwide leverage Browzwear’s technology, including Columbia Sportswear, PVH Group and VF Corporation, to streamline processes, collaborate and pursue data-driven production strategies.