[Featured image: Noyon Lanka, MAS’ knitted lace division]
Key Takeaways:
- Investment in 3D and digital product creation has focused on capabilities in design, development, sales and marketing. Fit remains an under-addressed stage of the product lifecycle, despite being essential to product outcomes.
- The value of a the later lifecycle stages of a digital twin are heavily influenced by the early stages of digitisation – making a strong argument for material capture being conducted by the partners and teams that are directly working on material development.
- Replicating the process of fitting garments on live models, digitally, will mean replacing traditional hard body 3D avatars with soft-tissue avatars that are able to react to garment pressure.
In the post-pandemic era, the role of Digital Product Creation (DPC) has transcended its initial position as a mere tool for visualisation – becoming a pivotal force in digital decision-making across product design and development. And in the face of economic challenges, companies using DPC tools are now in the process of figuring out the optimal strategies to extend the capabilities of 3D simulation, digital materials, and other ecosystem solutions to drive a more profound impact through the creation and use of true digital twins (DTs).
The hallmark of digital garments – the element people always talk about when 3D and DPC topics are raised – is their unparalleled speed and flexibility, but can this efficiency be harnessed with only selected stages in the value chain? Or, to put it another way, will the real value of digital product creation be unlocked by focusing on just design, prototyping and colour? And if not, what else is going to be required to reach that stage of having a genuine digital twin that can create value at every step of the route to market?
While significant strides have been made in mature DPC capabilities for product development and sales, a crucial question arises: can End-to-End (E2E) DPC truly be achieved without considering a vital stage – fitting? Another space that prompts reflection, when we think about the vision for digital twins, is true role of fabric suppliers. Should their contribution extend beyond providing digitised materials and into these additional stages where their expertise could make the difference between a digital asset and a genuine digital twin?
Based on our first-hand experience, this article aims to uncover the untapped reservoir of extended DPC capabilities within the full value chain, identify any missing elements, and providing tips on how to tap into these in service of creating a workflow that’s built on top of digital twins.
It’s Time To Bring The Tier 2 Supply Chain Onboard
The real value of speed is realised when digital assets move across the value chain faster than their physical counterparts could. So while a lot of brand strategies have been focused on beginning DPC from garment creation, why not explore what can be done at the fabric stage, by the teams that are directly working on material development? The capabilities are still developing, but the potential for transformative improvements is real.
Consider the time saving alone: fabric development is a far more time and cost-consuming process compared to garment development. More often than not, lack of flexibility in the fabric part of the supply chain is what limits brands from reacting to market changes in-season. Introducing the concept of digital twins for fabrics can be a significant unlock for all partners in the value chain, because it can directly influence the root causes for delays in speed to market, excessive costs, and lower agility.
While the scanning throughput of materials to create digital twins has exponentially increased, this has been primarily a value-add for brands and manufacturers – not a radical transformation. Faster and better scanning can expedite one part of the process, but makes little dent in the whole. Why? The cost and time of the material has already been incurred at the point of cutting a small swatch of the physical yardage for scanning. Just like the design and development stage, where early experimentation and visualisation are the key to both smart decision-making and time, cost, and sustainability improvements, value for fabric suppliers comes from having the ability to digitally create fabrics for use in the early sampling stages. Once fabric concepts are approved, scanning them then creates even deeper value in terms of replacing the need for physical catalogue or even sending sample yardage for garment sampling. These two approaches can complement each other in various stages of the fabric development calendar.
Sketch / Simulation To 3D
Imagine using a sketch from a lace design or a simulation from a drafting process to create a visually accurate digital material. Traditional lace making, which typically takes 3 to 6 weeks, can be significantly expedited through digital processes.
Today, a combination of DPC and adjacent tools allows the creation of lifelike material visuals in both traditional and engineered fabrics and for those visualisations to be used during the for ideation/concept stages, enabling digital decision-making well before physical samples are produced.
This approach extends beyond laces and can be applied to different types of materials. For example, using 3D knitting software, early digital samples can be developed and later integrated into garment prototyping software for full product visualisation. Preserving the authenticity of digital garments is most effectively achieved when development occurs at the source, and in this case, the source is the fabric supplier, who understands how the digital material should look and “feel” like.
More often than not, the complete seasonal collection that suppliers launch doesn’t always make it to sampling in full. Certain designs are left without a physical sample and only an artwork/sketch as a visual aid. Digital twins can come in handy for these occasions, offering a bridge between the sketch and the physical sample.
Is Fitting 3D In Truly Possible Today?
A digital sample with right foundational capabilities can move as much as 50%- 60% faster than the physical sampling process. But this level of speed cannot be unlocked through just one or two rounds of sampling. At times, the first round of Digital Twin (DT) might actually be slower than physical sampling considering the effort that needs to be front-loaded, such as material digitization & 3D garment creation. So where do those time savings actually come from? As the DT moves across the value chain, the work put in at the earliest stages (by suppliers and by their brand customers) has compounded benefits, and the incremental effort is comparatively less. A DT follows an additive process, whereas a physical sample is built all over again at every sampling need. As the need for digital sampling grows, the speed of the overall workflow can pick up drastically.
But despite the numerous advantages, the fitting stage is frequently bypassed in digital garment creation. Unlike other stages, making decisions digitally about the fit of a garment involves more than just using available functionalities in the 3D tools. To transition effectively to digital fitting, contemporary 3D software necessitates several new upgrades such as an accurate soft tissue simulation and properties of all types of materials and stitches, ensuring a more authentic and realistic representation in the digital fitting stage.
Soft Body Avatars
In the traditional physical process, the fitting stage often takes place on a live model, introducing a dynamic element to the process – a departure from the fixed dress forms used in other stages. Migrating this process to 3D means, then, replacing the hard body avatars that 3D tools use with a more ‘living’, model-like avatar. A soft tissue avatar that can react to the pressure of the garment is the key.
Encouraging more users to adopt digital fit comes through confidence in knowing the 3D simulation of the digital fit is near accurate to that of the physical twin. This confidence comes when the digital model is a representation of a scientifically developed and validated avatar that can mimic the behaviour of a live physical model. Such accurate simulation of a garment fit comes when the avatar can produce varied tissue behaviour based on muscle density and location.
Accurate Material Properties
The fitting stage is all about precision, where even minute variations of a few millimetres can significantly impact the outcome, particularly in the context of close-to-body garments like intimates. Accurate material properties of not only the base fabrics but also seams and stitches play a vital role in simulating the accurate behaviour of the overall garment.
Achieving the desired fit on a model involves an intricate combination of garment construction, the physics of various materials and stitches, bendable hardware and consideration of the model’s soft tissue.
How Ready Is 3D Fitting For Today’s Work?
In order to successfully unlock digital fit, we believe accurate soft avatars that is a true digital twin of the fit model as well as material physics play a vital role. Our knowledge shared here is based on hands-on and industry benchmarked validation work being conducted by MAS’ product development experts, in partnership with a technology company, to understand and verify what it would take to finally unlock the ability to fit in 3D. Our extensive experiments, conducted for over 2 years, included validating a curated set of garments worn by a live model and her scanned digital body against fit measurements/visual fit appearance and pressure, which provided us with the insights needed to confidently understand what is required launch fitting in 3D. While technology can always evolve to provide further value, we see that the results of our experiments are proving to be promising, and they are allowing our teams to launch pilots with our brand partners to bring this officially to the industry. The technology will evolve with more early adopters taking part in experiments and sharing feedback that comes from running continuous experiments. We hope the work we are soon to conclude and share openly with the industry will give insightful learnings to fellow early adopters to explore how digital fit can be a part of their DPC journey.
Value Beyond The Physical Process
The major pitfall in relying on digital tools is confining their benefits to just creating replicas of pre-existing, narrow physical processes. Digital tools offer a broader horizon, presenting possibilities beyond replicating traditional methods in a digital format. Digital fit unlocks opportunities unattainable through physical processes, such as moving away from the need for calibrated models to the exact digital version of a model that becomes a universal fitting standard across suppliers, ensuring consistency. This also unlocks opportunity to maintain fit consistency across traditionally challenging models such as kids, maternity, different-abled, and plus-size as live models may change shape or not every vendor might be able to find the models as easily.
Digital avatars introduce a scientific and standardized approach to fitting, mitigating the subjectivity associated with model feedback. Moreover, it facilitates benchmarking fits across sizes and product ranges, empowering brands and vendors to make decisions concurrently on multiple digital models, a capability previously unattainable. Being able to scientifically quantify fit, which can become a standardised way of interpreting comfort can create a game changing opportunity in the product development realm.