This is a critical time for the fashion industry, with creators simultaneously facing growing consumer demand for more products each season and pressure to deliver more sustainable, efficient operations. Modern brands must efficiently and affordably scale their content creation capabilities while providing best-in-class customer experiences. 3D is one of the best solutions in such a competitive scenario.
The 3D revolution
There are big advantages to adopting 3D. Unlike a traditional physical prototype, a 3D model of a shirt can be created quickly, consumes no raw materials to produce and can be used anywhere in production, from initial design iterations to final marketing imagery. It can even be used to generate a rendered image of a virtual product on a website.
And yet for a digital representation of a garment or accessory to effectively communicate its properties, it must be utterly realistic. It must be credible. This is where the Substance 3D tools come in.
According to Nicolas Joachim, Senior Manager – Corporate Strategy, Puma, “Puma has benefited from implementing 3D and digital creation technologies across several key areas. These innovations have allowed for better design validation through realistic 3D visuals, enabling more informed decisions early in the design and development process. Additionally, 3D content has enhanced storytelling capabilities, helping to illustrate how products and technologies come to life. With a strong focus on their creative community, Puma has been exploring the Adobe Substance capabilities to enhance their current design processes.”
What is the Adobe Substance 3D suite?
The Adobe Substance 3D suite comprises a complete, standalone 3D creative workflow, as well as can integrate with other 3D apps such as VStitcher or CLO. Global brands including HUGO BOSS, Louis Vuitton, H&M, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Amazon and Burberry have adopted Substance 3D tools to improve their product design and visualisation processes as well as to accelerate the creation of digital content at scale.
Bastiaan Geluk, Head of Digital Fashion, INDG, stated, “At INDG Fashion, we help fashion brands transform their 3D digitisation processes to enable beautiful content at scale. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and deep expertise in CGI and digital twin creation, we support brands in streamlining their content production and enhancing their visual storytelling. Our end-to-end solutions ensure seamless integration of 3D assets into design, marketing and e-commerce, allowing brands to create hyper-realistic content that drives engagement across all channels and innovation across the entire product lifecycle. INDG Fashion has been following the development of the Adobe Substance toolset since day one and has implemented Substance as a key ingredient to achieve material and texture quality throughout all projects.”
Focus on fashion
The fashion sector is an area of key focus and innovation in the Substance 3D ecosystem, with each update boosting the efficiency of apparel- and accessory-focused workflows. Some notable recent developments include, for instance:
Even closer integration with Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator: Working across a range of apps is fast and fluid.
Integration with the HP Z Captis material scanner: Working in partnership with HP, the Substance 3D team has developed this scanner capable of digitising material samples at 8K resolution, which can thereafter be customised directly in Substance 3D Sampler as needed.
Embroidery generators and filters: Transform any 2D image into a realistic woven embroidery that can be dynamically modified and personalised.
Generative AI features: Features such as Text to Pattern and Text to Texture allow creators to generate a selection of resources at blinding speed, which can then be further developed if required. Image to Texture allows the generation of seamless textures from any reference image.
A brief customer spotlight: Substance 3D at Decathlon
Cyrille Ancely, Digital Product Asset Manager at Decathlon, briefed, “The integration of Substance 3D in the creation process and industrialisation process has allowed us to gain more control, to increase the quality of our products and therefore the satisfaction of customers/users.”
Decathlon is the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, with more than 1,700 stores in 59 countries. Offering an extensive selection of apparel and equipment across a multitude of sports, it successfully sells its products through a diverse portfolio of more than 50 distinct sub-brands, each operating for a different sports category and having its own unique product design pipeline.
Some years ago, the company initiated its digital transformation journey by leveraging the power of the 3D design process in key aspects of its pipeline. Using Substance 3D Sampler, Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Stager, along with CLO, Blender and Adobe Photoshop, it created a centralised digital twin library while allowing each sub-brand to remain flexible in their workflow preferences. This allowed designers to get access to an extensive material library – digital replicas of the physical fabrics and materials that were commonly used within the company.
The return on investment of this digital transformation was notable:
- A reduction in product development time: -33% on Apparel and Bags
- A reduction in the number of prototypes: -33% on Footwear
- An increase in the number of CMF iterations: up to 60 times more
Shifting to Substance
It’s easier than ever to integrate the Substance 3D ecosystem into your creative workflow. For more information, reach out to your nearest Adobe authorised resellers.
