This article was originally published in The Interline’s DPC Report 2024. To read other opinion pieces, exclusive editorials, and detailed profiles and interviews with key vendors, download the full DPC Report 2024 completely free of charge and ungated.
Digital product creation, on the whole, has delivered value.
Where that value is found, and how deep it runs, is variable company-by-company, product category by product category. But as three years’ worth of DPC Reports from The Interline now attest: the businesses that have made a concerted effort to turn 3D into a cornerstone of their ways of working, and that have combined the right doses of talent, technology, and executive and end user buy-in, have realised the benefits.
And those single-company benefits have, over the last couple of years in particular, compounded into widespread DPC adoption. We validated this just last month in findings from the Fashion & Technology In 2025 report we partnered with MMGNET to create, which showed that around 90% of fashion organisations have already implemented 3D / DPC strategies. Even though our audience tends to be more technologically-mature than the industry average, this result is consistent across all product categories and market tiers.
The benefits those companies have obtained from DPC, though, have largely kept coming in well-defined, individual areas. There are brands that have framed digital product creation as a design and development initiative, and have achieved success there. Some have made it a pillar of fit testing, or market testing, or supplier collaboration, or leaned into product configurators or creating final pixels for B2B and B2C selling. And most of those have seen potent but focused returns.
There are way fewer companies who have rolled out DPC – and most importantly the 3D assets it generates – to all those areas in a unified way. This is why phrases like “extending the value of digital assets” (see my colleague Emma’s article on that topic in this very report!) and “scaling DPC strategies” have become so commonplace. As valuable as DPC initiatives have been, there’s the widespread realisation that they could do more if more people, more departments, and more job roles were brought into their orbit.
I can point to the same MMGNET / The Interline research for another up-to-date litmus test here: a similar share of fashion professionals, around 90%, agree that 3D / DPC is going to deliver significant additional value in the near future. And my industry-insider read is that that extra value is primarily going to come from deploying digital tools, talent, and assets to serve new use cases and new ambitions, rather than going deeper into existing processes. Which is not to say that depth isn’t a worthy pursuit – it is – but that breadth is likely to be what DPC needs to unlock the next stages of business transformation.
In last year’s DPC Report, I set out to try and put a marker down for what should constitute “new” in those various contexts, describing what I thought could be the end state for digital product creation. I’ll paraphrase myself: the ideal vision for having a digital representation of a physical product is that digital-native workflows across the extended product lifecycle will use that representation as their primary reference. From that, provided the representation is properly built and sufficiently interoperable, every creative and commercial choice that’s currently made based on a physical prototype, sample, or finished product would then be confidently made based on the digital representation instead.
We are not, today, at that end state. While that manifesto is, I believe, still valid as a distant-but-reachable goalpost, what it doesn’t address is where the road is going in the interim between here and there. And neither does it specify what’s going to fuel the different legs of the journey.
You’ll find a lot of answers to those open questions throughout this report: everybody from in-house brand experts to independent creatives to the founders of key DPC tech companies has their take on where things have progressed, where they’ve stalled, and what should happen next. That diversity of perspectives is why we continue to put these reports together, because these are the people driving transformation year-over-year – and many of them have been at it for a long time.
My perspective is probably a little different from the rest, if only because it comes from a fairly privileged vantage point. As I explained in my introduction, I’ve been a 3D / computer graphics enthusiast for most of my life, and today I’m lucky enough to spend a bunch of time talking to brands, technology companies, educators, analysts and more specifically about where 3D for fashion and footwear stands today, and where it should be headed tomorrow.
And if I roll up the conversations I’ve had in 2024, they lead me to three conclusions.
The first I’ve already set out above: DPC has proven itself in a range of different disciplines and processes. This does not automatically mean that every 3D or DPC initiative is guaranteed a return (you’ll find different angles on this across our 2022, 2023, and 2024 DPC Reports) but it does mean that, on aggregate, DPC is working when companies approach it smartly and sensitively.
Second: we are now in an era of smaller, more measured technological and cultural steps that will make the existing 3D paradigm work better, but that will stop short of breaking down any bigger walls.
From a technical point of view, this will result in better simulation, better staging and rendering for virtual photography, greater interoperability, more standardisation, more flexibility in file formats and file sizes. And it will also lead towards the first notable steps in DPC-enabled collaboration, with a clear through-line from people working in 3D and relying on external means to share their outputs with colleagues, to different teams starting to use 3D assets as the anchorpoint for their decisions.
Culturally, this change in reference frame will lead to some steady growth in the DPC user community, some expansion in the use cases for digital assets, and progressively more creative and commercial choices being made based on the output of 3D tools, but not directly in 3D environments.
Why are we, as an industry, standing up and scaling a significant 3D function if many of our essential decisions still require a 3D product to be down-converted to a 2D representation so that the full range of job roles can interact with it?
But as that extension happens, the conversation will more than likely switch to a related question: why are we, as an industry, standing up and scaling a significant 3D function if many of our essential decisions still require a 3D product to be down-converted to a 2D representation so that the full range of job roles can interact with it?
This is the third conclusion: there is a difference between a fashion industry that builds products in 3D, then exports them in 2D formats so that people can experience and make choices based on them, and an industry where the 3D product and the act of interacting with – and making choices based on – it are also 3D-native.
For this step-change to happen, the additive technological and cultural refinement I’ve already mentioned will also need to happen, but those two shifts are likely to need to be accompanied by a third one: a move into real-time 3D.
The scope of this change needs much more in the way of dissection than I have space for here, but the essence is this: rather than creating 3D assets and environments at one extreme end of the product lifecycle or the other (i.e. in design or in selling) and then exporting those things to flat images when their content and context needs to be communicated, a real-time pipeline would remove the need to step down from 3D to 2D.
This might sound like a minor distinction, but the practical implications could be profound. A product, after all, is made up of much more than what can be conveyed in a sketch or a photograph. This is the entire justification for designing, developing, simulating and visualising in 3D to begin with!
When we think about what that “end state” for DPC looks like, it becomes clearer that a lot of the broad spectrum of different creative and commercial decisions that need to be taken rely on data, contextual queues, and experiences that static 3D simply doesn’t provide. And when we look to other industries that have previously undergone deep business transformations catalysed by 3D, we can see that a move towards real-time 3D is where business in general is headed, and that the business case for making that transition is strong.
To get a better grasp on that cross-industry perspective, I reached out to Bill Clifford, VP and GM of Unreal Engine at Epic Games:
“If you want to scale the use of 3D in digital design , you need to have a real-time strategy – it’s the best way for designers and decision makers to stay aligned every step of the way. Teams need the ability to make iterative changes across entire product lines while contextualising their designs in photoreal environments, whether they be a forest, a tabletop, or a store. You can bring products to life, enable real-time multi-user collaboration, and make the design review process far more efficient by using real-time tools like Unreal Engine and Twinmotion. If your design team adopts a real-time 3D pipeline, you’ll have high fidelity digital representations of your products that can also be leveraged in dynamic sales and marketing experiences. What starts with driving efficiency in the design process ends with immersive, rich digital customer experiences that drive sales and build brand loyalty.”
While fashion can be – probably understandably – hung up on the idea of cross-media collaboration opportunities with Fortnite and other videogame / shared world properties, I asked for Bill’s perspective here for different reasons.
One is that Unreal Engine has become pretty synonymous with the idea of real-time rendering – right the way from design to downstream experiences – across a range of different industries. Another is, as you will have seen if you’re reading this article as part of the sequential order of stories in The DPC Report 2024, we drafted the broader Epic team in to help visualise our designers’ work in the footwear and digital fashion categories this year – primarily to help demonstrate just how the results designers can obtain from traditional and real-time workflows are converging, and to spotlight the increasingly smooth pathway between 3D creation and 3D experience.
Finally, because of the scale of the business transformation that potentially lies ahead of fashion as the industry navigates the cultural and technological shifts that are on the way, The Interline will be collaborating with Epic Games in 2025 to help document what real-time 3D could mean specifically for fashion, and to chart a practical course for capitalising on its opportunities.
Because for fashion to get closer to that end state, and for the industry to unlock the next big reservoir of value from DPC, I now see that step-change to real-time 3D being critical.