Automating 3D Design workflows with plugins for an innovative fashion company
Context
Browzwear creates 3D design software, widely used in the fashion industry. Designers use it to prototype designs in 3D, testing for fit, function, and style. The software allows for rapid iteration with patterns, materials, and colors enabling collaboration with Technical Designers, Product Developers, and factory partners.
Compared to traditional workflows, 3D design technologies like Browzwear, along with competitors like CLO and Optitex, significantly reduce time, cost, and waste when bringing new products to market.
Challenge
Browzwear improved our client’s Digital Product Creation (DPC) workflow, however designing at scale introduced tasks in the product lifecycle that required hundreds or even thousands of Designer inputs to complete. Secondly, the organization stored digital assets across it’s DPC systems which weren’t always accessible within Browzwear. This made managing seasonal materials/colors more challenging and created “source of truth” issues for Designers.
This is where Theodo came in.
Cutting Clicks, Saving Time
Browzwear looks to integrate with a diverse and growing DPC ecosystem, operating an open API. This enabled Theodo to develop custom plugins that could dramatically improve our client’s Designer’s quality of life, eliminating days from their workflows.
Here are three examples:
Snapshot Renders at scale
Whenever a product lifecycle milestone arrived our client would generate snapshot renders for the entire collection. This involved opening each garment, selecting poses, selecting sizes along with other desired settings, and then waiting for it to render before starting the process again with the next garment. Larger collections could take a whole day to complete, occupying their laptop, and stopping designers from tackling other work. With the plugin, they select a folder containing the collection, choose inputs upfront in under 10 minutes, and can run the renders overnight!
Automated Pattern Overlay
When Technical Designers adjust the pattern they often want to reference its previous shape. Browzwear allows you to generate a pattern overlay, however, this requires a multi-click process with a lot of user input to ensure accuracy. With the plugin, Designers can select a part, click the plugin, and the overlay is instantly generated. This saves 1-2 minutes, thousands of times every season.
Connecting DPC systems
Our client was working hard to roll out a DAM and unifying PLM systems, but Apparel designers couldn’t always access the digital assets they needed. They spent a lot of time outside of Browzwear finding what they needed and confirming they had the latest version. We built an integration enabling them to access the most critical seasonal palettes from within Browzwear, eliminating guesswork and saving time.
Over half of organizations report that hiring digital talent is a major blocker in their DPC transformation, and designer’s time is a rare commodity, so giving them the right tools to be efficient is critical.
Implementing custom plugins for Browzwear's VStitcher and Lotta software had a significant impact on our client and their Browzwear users. We were able to eliminate 1-2 weeks of tedious, manual work every season, freeing up their team to focus on the customer, be creative, and design great products.
Check out some of the tips and tricks our developers picked up along the way, here.