The Art of Learning
Welcome to The Holt Co.'s very first blog entry!
As an industry professional, I'm usually heads down, starting a project or season, in the trenches, or celebrating our team success in bringing a product to market. I have to make extra effort to partition my time—to keep my skills and digital literacy up to date.
Yes, I said 'digital literacy'! Last night's conversation around the dinner table was about NFTs, the Metaverse and what it all means. I might add, the conversation was with two of the great minds in game development and the MS dev world. We discussed the mechanics of NFTs, its pros and cons, legal implications, and affect in the financial markets. Suffice to say, I still don’t understand it enough to explain it in this entry. I have more to learn. Let's add that to my digital literacy To-Do list.
Back to refreshing my skills! At least, well enough to speak with first-hand knowledge. I was introduced to Style3D at the beginning of this year. After working with 3D in many different flavors for over 20 years, I got very excited with this platform. Style3D addressed a number of pain points such as seamless access to digital fabrics and trims assets, beautiful animated avatars, and photorealistic renderings. Best of all, cloud collaboration makes it easy for me to hand off to talented designers, so they can make my 3D prototypes look amazing.
As a learning exercise, I picked up Style3D very quickly with only a one-hour orientation with a Style3D trainer. One of our clients, Narvan Apparel graciously gave me permission to use patterns created for them in Optitex. While not technical, it met my goal of creating a beautiful hi-res animation that behaves fluidly.
I started by creating some digital fabrics hanging around my studio. Using my basic, old flatbed office scanner, I digitized a fabric swatch, then applied Style3D cotton fabric preset for physical properties and automatically created shaders.
Scanned and edited in Style3D, 100% cotton plain woven
Scanned fabric with cotton preset physical properties applied
Once my fabric was ready, I used Optitex to generate a DXF garment pattern and imported it into Style 3D. I removed unnecessary style lines and pieces, then stitched them together, and draped them on a default-sized avatar. I had to make some pattern adjustments using the Pattern Editor to make it fit smaller. After that, I explored how to manage buttons, button holes, elastic waist shirring and the platform's layer management. Best of all, I used the pretty fabric that I scanned in.
2D Pattern view in Style3D
2D to 3D placement of pattern pieces and the simulation of the default pose of the avatar
This is the result! I have to say that it's is very EMPOWERING to be able to create a virtual prototype that looked this amazing.
Only Style3D software was used to create this asset.
If you have any topics (sizing, pattern making, product types) that you would like me to address for upcoming blog entries, please reach out to me through my Contact page.