The Interline has partnered with Epic Games to publish a new, downloadable guide to what real-time 3D really means for fashion, how it relates to the first wave of digital product creation – and what comes next. The Real-Time Roadmap is free to download in low-impact, shareable size or archival quality.
For years, the companies that invested the most time and the right energy into 3D initiatives and digital product creation (DPC) strategies have seen compelling returns.
But with global uncertainty peaking, new pressures being applied to technology investments and headcounts, ongoing challenges in integrating systems and workflows, a massive push towards volume and velocity in content creation, and new creative and commercial possibilities being left unexplored as a result, fashion is now gearing up to evaluate a fundamentally different model for 3D.
This model, centred on real-time 3D creation, communication, and collaboration, has the potential to package up and then enhance the successes achieved through DPC so far. It offers a framework for markedly extending the value of existing digital products, environments, assets, toolchains, and skillsets. It could create a pathway to dramatically expand the 3D community – both creators and consumers.
And, crucially, this new approach could also underpin future-facing models of enterprise decision-making, and become the engine behind fundamentally different modes of inward and outward-facing storytelling.
But what exactly is real-time 3D? How does it fit into and around the committed community and the complex ecosystem of tools, pipelines, and processes that have defined fashion’s journey into 3D so far? Is the business case part of the vision for digital fashion and video game crossovers, or something separate? And what have other industries already accomplished with real-time technology that fashion could learn from?
In essence, a shift towards real-time 3D could represent a different era for how apparel and footwear companies think about the digitisation of their products and processes, and the tools available to their people. And the impact of that transition could be measured on both a broader and a deeper scale than the narrower results of 3D and DPC strategies fashion companies have grown familiar with.
To better understand how ready fashion is to make a more all-encompassing transition, to document the creative and commercial business cases for real-time, and to chart a practical roadmap forwards, The Interline – with support from Epic Games, the company behind culture-defining properties like Fortnite and stress-tested, turnkey tools like Twinmotion – has created a new roadmap report – hot on the heels of Unreal Fest 2025 – that:
- Benchmarks – with the help of leading professionals and industry thinkers – the progress that fashion has made with DPC, evaluates levels of industry maturity, and provides an outlook for what the industry wishes to accomplish next.
- Defines real-time 3D: the tools, the processes, the workflows, and how they interact with current DPC platforms, pipelines, and processes.
- Explains the differences between real-time rendering, digital fashion, and the business opportunities that exist for fashion in video games.
- Breaks down what a real-time 3D content creation and decision-making pipeline will look like. Where it will borrow best practices from other sectors, and where fashion has the opportunity to pass on its own learnings to those industries.
- Looks behind the curtain at tools, content, marketplaces, MetaHumans, and workflows from one of the leading real-time engine and ecosystem custodians.
- Provides a roadmap for getting to grips with the next wave of 3D.
Download your copy directly from The Interline using the links above, and find out more about Twinmotion, MetaHumans, and Unreal Engine by visiting their Epic Games websites.
The Interline and Epic will also be hosting a live online event based on the key themes of this roadmap report in October of 2025. Registration details will be announced soon.