The Interline commissioned Canberk Karakas to create for our “Footwear” category in our DPC Report 2024. Based in Istanbul, Canberk is a 3D Designer & Art Director who specialises in digital design and development in fashion, footwear, and luxury goods.
With a background in classical design, a broad 3D skillset, and cross-industry knowledge and experience, Canberk focuses on helping brands to hit their production and marketing goals in creative and innovative ways.
Our team chatted to Canberk – and to Martin Krasemann from Epic Games, who brought Canberk’s designs to life in Twinmotion, the intuitive real-time visualisation solution for Unreal Engine – about how he approached the challenge of designing for The Interline, how he believes the footwear industry is embracing 3D, and what’s next for DPC in education and industry use cases.
Entered into the 5TH GFA Global Footwear Awards 2024 Edition, Canberk’s Retrouvailles Trackstar sneaker design recently won an award in both the Independent Fashion Sneaker Winner and Best Overall Fashion Sneaker categories.
The Interline: Walk us through the creative intent behind your design for this year’s report, and tell us a little bit about where you find footwear inspiration in general.
Canberk Karakas: The pair I’ve designed for this year’s report carries fashion-aware notes along its silhouette, with layers of panels and embellishments. The creative and performative intent behind this production is to showcase methods, possibilities and hopefully new ways of creation, which I find to be quite important when it comes to an industry like footwear, where the design work, materials and resources are more expensive to actualise – making the power of 3D to virtualise them even more vital.
Footwear is one of those things where I count it to be more than a wearable, it’s almost like a house-hold object that occupies space and demands attention. The more rigid nature of it enables me to approach it in a very different way than clothing. And because of that, finding inspiration means looking at a broader canvas, because the ideas that spark an early concept can be found in architecture, sculptures and experimental design.
The Interline: This is the first year that The Interline has featured a 3D footwear designer. How different a discipline is it compared to traditional footwear design and engineering? And while a lot of first principles are different between categories, how much crossover is there in terms of the toolset and workflow with 3D design for accessories, apparel, and consumer products?
Canberk Karakas: There are lots of different steps to start from when approaching footwear design on a more traditional path, but I’d say doing it in a 3D space is very similar. There are still a lot of calculations and numbers going in; even though it’s 3D, we still have to have a good understanding of shape, harmony, form and materials. The biggest difference though, is the speed of your workflow. In 3D, there isn’t really a limit, and there are no resources to run out of. This non-stop progress makes way for better performance for a designer, and gives you more time to think through the design and explore different ideas.
Footwear is one of those things I count to be more than a wearable – it’s almost like a household object that occupies space and demands attention.
Toolsets are another big difference I’ve seen develop. Most ‘traditional’ footwear designers still use CAD software like Rhinoceros or Solidworks, targeted for a more industrial design use-case, and a lot of 3D Designers like myself will usually work with Polygonal softwares like Cinema4D, Maya and Blender. Computer Aided Design programs focus on accuracy, tolerance and production. Modelling programs like Cinema4D focus on visual quality, animation and usability for digital use-cases. I’ve had the chance to work with a few models that were created in a CAD software, and it usually needs a lot of work for it to look good within the render engine.
So even though the idea is the same, the end result and overall experience and objectives are not. This case isn’t that dramatic for apparel I’d say, since cloth simulation tools like Clo3D or Style3D are widely used for any kind of soft-goods, both for production and digital use-cases.
The Interline: How did you initially become interested in working in 3D? Where did the first spark come from? And is that the same thing that motivates you today?
Canberk Karakas: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sneakers. I was also into fashion and styling, but footwear has always been different. When I eventually got into Yeditepe University, in Istanbul, to get my BFA in Graphic Design, I found myself surrounded by creative people more than at any time in my life before. Coming from a smaller town in Turkey, this was a big deal for me. As I was carrying on with Graphic Design, I realised that it eventually wouldn’t be enough to feed my creative hunger, so I returned to what I knew I enjoyed a lot when I was a kid, which was sketching concepts of sneakers. But since I’d had, by that point, more exposure to design, I had to find a way to standardize my ideas. That’s when I started researching different methods of design, and I eventually found 3D workflows.
I wanted to recreate my early designs in 3D, but I realised I needed to get good at it first. I knew I wouldn’t be able to physically produce the styles I was imagining, as I was a student and production is expensive – especially in footwear. So 3D was basically my gateway to being able to do what I loved and see my ideas brought to life, and that’s still the way I think about it today.
Everything then branched out from that point on, and even though my biggest motivation is helping brands and creatives worldwide now, I know I’m a step closer than I’ve ever been to creating my own pair of shoes!
The Interline: How much of your current 3D skillset is self-taught, and how much did you acquire through formal education?
Canberk Karakas: A big chunk of it is self-taught. After getting my BFA from Yeditepe University, I moved to Vancouver BC to study Animation & VFX at Vancouver Film School. I already knew quite a lot about 3D before heading out there, but I was fortunate enough to then get the opportunity to improve my skills further with professionals from a different industry, and to make meaningful connections.
The Interline: How should educational institutions that either focus on footwear or have dedicated footwear modules approach teaching 3D? Should it be part of the standard curriculum, to help prepare the next generation of designers and engineers for digital-native workflows, or is 3D still seen as a narrow specialisation in-industry, making it a better fit for elective courses?
Canberk Karakas: I strongly believe 3D should be taught if it’s even slightly useful for whatever profession the school focuses on. It’s the fastest way of actualising concepts, and allows the student to find out what their creative tendencies are. It opens different doors like animation, lighting, rendering and so on. These are incredibly valuable skills for a creative person to have, whatever discipline they then decide to get into.
I think 3D in general came a long way in the past couple of years – even more in fashion than in footwear, I’d argue, because brands and manufacturers worldwide are realising what 3D can do for their business. Not only design-to-production use cases, but across the spread of different ways that 3D Designers and the assets they create can help with marketing as well.
All of these skill sets and talent squeezed into a tight-knit team can honestly do wonders for this industry. Being educated on it isn’t an absolute must, but I’m sure if institutions wanted to integrate 3D training into their curriculum, people would be more interested in learning it now that it’s becoming such a heavily sought-after skill.
The Interline: And what about the existing footwear community? We know from interviews in last year’s DPC Report that there’s a major drive from big sports and lifestyle brands to start every new design in 3D. But footwear is also both an engineering-driven industry and one with a lot of deeply concentrated expertise that people (the seasoned “shoe dogs”) acquired through hands-on work, and this could translate into inertia when it comes to building trust in 3D.
Canberk Karakas: It differs for each brand for sure, but 3D is already heavily used in the footwear industry, and that trust is being built. But I think it can get a bit more expressive, and that’s where we’re going to see more development.
Rather than only thinking of the product, why not think of the environment around the product in 3D as well? Why not strategise content and marketing in 3D? When photography first gained traction many years ago, painters were also questioning it. But obviously it didn’t end painting, it ended up evolving it. So I’m very positive we’re going to see the industry evolve in the hands of designers and engineers in 3D space, making use of each and every aspect it can offer to a business.
The Interline: Tell us what your hardware setup looks like. What operating system do you use? And what’s sat on and around your desk?
Canberk Karakas: I’m running a desktop workstation on Windows with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU and an Intel Core i9 12900K CPU, paired with the beautiful LG UltraFine Ergo Display. On and around my desk are usually a few pairs of shoes to quickly check a design choice, a few of my mom’s hand-made miniature models, and Rizzoli’s ‘Jeff Staple – Not Just Sneakers’ edition.
The Interline: As well as demonstrating different colourways, we’re showcasing your work in two different ways across this year’s report. One is using your personal workflow and pipeline, and the other is bringing your designs into Epic Games’ TwinMotion, the intuitive frontend for real-time visualisation and contextual storytelling in Unreal Engine. First tell us what your main workflow looks like, and what tools you used to concept, model, texture, and then create these renders.
Canberk Karakas: My typical workflow will usually start with rough sketches and then a 2D blueprint illustration of what I’m creating and what it will include. Once those are done, I’ll jump on to Cinema4D for early concepting, explore measurements, form and silhouette.
Once the detailed modeling is done, I’ll unwrap the model for fabrics and materials, to be textured in Substance Painter. Each project requires its own specifications, so the time in and between these softwares differs a lot depending on what I’m working on. After texturing, I’ll kick start the Redshift Render engine and start the look development stage. Lighting plays a huge role in 3D. To help the viewer understand what they’re looking at, I’ll recreate a realistic-ish look & feel with a few stylistic touches here and there.
The Interline: What was the process, from your side, of exporting your designs for use in Unreal Engine? And how do you think this ease of interoperability should influence the way footwear companies think about the different use cases for their digital assets?
Canberk Karakas: I absolutely loved this part, as it basically required nothing special. Once the model and textures are ready to go, so is Unreal Engine and Twinmotion. It sure was exciting to see my design in a real-time environment. This, to me, is huge, because there are lots of things that can be done in real-time that can’t be done with offline rendering and static images. Brand activations, interactive experiences and immersive environments. In this time and age, if there’s one thing a brand should prioritise, it’s their community, and Unreal Engine and Twinmotion are amazing tools for that – ways to create meaningful connections for their community via digital experiences.
The Interline: After exporting his designs, Canberk collaborated with Martin Krasemann, a Twinmotion Product Specialist at Epic Games. Martin used the Twinmotion toolset to demonstrate the flexibility of incorporating standard objects and materials into different real-time scenes, allowing him to showcase Canberk’s designs in unique environments quickly and easily, so that creative ideas can be seen in context. Martin also set out to demonstrate how the fidelity gap between offline rendering and real-time rendering is closing. So we asked him what his process looked like, and what implications he thinks this onramp from 3D creation to real-time 3D storytelling has for how the footwear and fashion industries think about digital product creation.
Martin Krasemann: The process was pretty straightforward. I imported the shoe into Twinmotion in the FBX file format and started to apply all the materials created by Canberk.
One of Twinmotion’s cool features is its templates, which anyone can use to quickly get started on a new project. There is actually a template dedicated to creating a packshot, so I used that as my starting point. I quickly assigned materials simply by dragging and dropping them on to the various parts of the shoe, and then, using the preset camera views in the template, it took me just a couple of clicks to create the packshot covering all angles from the shoe.
The next step was to create the colour variants; again, it was a matter of minutes to create them within the same real-time scene.
The workshop scene is actually a Twinmotion scene one of my colleagues has been working on and that’s planned to ship as a new Twinmotion template. We decided to use this scene on this project to test its quality and see what can Twinmotion achieve in a more in-context environment. Dropping the shoe variants into that new scene and doing all the shots took me just an hour or so. The ability to navigate in real time in the scene at that level of quality means it’s really quick to position the camera and try many camera angles.
Working in a real-time environment like this is amazing for designers. Not only can you experiment with different materials and colourways and see the results instantly, but you can respond to feedback on the fly, right in front of stakeholders. And you can show them what the product would look like in any context, from the retail shelf to any indoor or outdoor environment. It’s incredibly fun to be able to set the scene and tell any story you want so quickly and easily.
I think everyone would love to see more advanced and accurate versions of the products they’re buying and selling.
The Interline: Finally, Canberk, what’s your perspective on how consumers and retailers feel about seeing renders rather than physical photography? Aside from homewares and automotive, the footwear and accessories sectors have probably pushed the furthest forward in showcasing their products using 3D assets in place of real product – especially in advertising and storytelling. But are eCommerce marketplaces set up to receive and showcase 3D objects? And are shoppers ready to make pretty fine-grained, subjective buying decisions based on those objects?
Canberk Karakas: This is just another beautiful usage of 3D. I think most eCommerce marketplaces have already integrated their own 3D solution or already worked with a provider, as the bigger chunk of shoppers prefer online shopping.
If not done accurately though, it might turn into an unpleasant experience for consumers, and most brands cannot afford that. This is what’s going to push brands, and stress-test whether their systems, pipelines, and processes are up-to-date and open for further innovation.
3D is already pretty realistic, and now consumers can explore their products in 3D with their fingertips and make better-informed decisions around whether they’ll like the product or not, across a lot of different subjective criteria. I see this as an investment made by both parties, both in time and money, and I think everyone would love to see more advanced and accurate versions of the products they’re buying and selling.