Virtual Fashion
Inspiring your customers is at the heart of fashion retail. Models and manikins alike have been driving sales of clothes since the beginning of time, so why stop there when it comes to cgi? At Blotto we have embraced virtual fashion, we now provide solutions that enable our fashion clients to display suits and dresses in any fabric without so much as a needle or thread in sight.
With our in-house scanning technology we have created a fashion workflow that allows us to rapidly scan clothes and fabrics so that they can be virtually dressed onto a model or manikin.
The challenges of virtual fashion are considerable, and it is only recent advances in rendering and scanning together with our years of research and development in cgi that have made this even possible, let alone affordable. The acquired agility from being able to visualise clothing in a new pattern or fabric and drape it onto a model is the future arrived today.
There are two aspects to deploying clothing as virtual fashion. First is the design itself, the block. We use a high resolution 3d scanner to capture the exact shape and drape of the object and from this we can create a virtual 'mesh' that will be used to render the final image. Secondly we take scans of the cloth itself. We have developed a specialist fabric scanner to do this, it can scan up to a square metre of cloth so we will capture every nuance of the weave and pattern. Not only do we capture the visible aspects of the cloth such as its colour, but also the subtle effects that a regular camera can't see; the creases of a linen, the light bending qualities of velvet, the roughness of a brushed cotton or the sheen of an Italian silk. The combination of these surface properties in the fabric allows us to reproduce them in cgi under any new lighting condition and any camera angle. Finally we accessorise the garment with our vast library of cg objects such as buttons, shirts and blouses to add the finishing touch to each set dressing.
Before we render out your virtual fashion imagery we will establish a 'look' using virtual lights and cameras with a skilled cg lighting artist (think photographer) and the rest is handled by the computer as it creates the images in as many combinations and permutations your imagination will allow.
As well as standard flat images we can also offer 3d virtual reality and augmented reality solutions for mobile using the very same assets and techniques described above. So you won't feel left behind as the world moves forward into the digital age.
