Creating the US Biathlon Team’s Racing Suits | DMIx by ColorDigital x Maloja Clothing | PI Apparel

Nice to meet you, everyone, and I want to show you a little bit about the journey, the 3D journey with DMX. My name is Gerd Wiltzschütz. I'm coming from the company Color Digital. We are based in Germany, in Cologne, and basically we have built an ecosystem for Brands and their suppliers to interact with everything that makes sense in digital product development, in digital product control. So we not only do the digital way of things, we also go into physical way of measuring colors, quality control of colors, all that kind of stuff. So basically there are three main parts that we cover. One is the whole color management process. Then the second one is the DPC and raw material process. And then we have also final stage, the DPC-based product presentation and rendering process. So basically in the end, we have an end-to-end solution and there are some tools and some functionalities under these three pillars. And of course, we can also interact with existing systems. So we have APIs where we can give data to PLM systems, or we can exchange, of course, with existing 3D systems like Browzware, CLO, and all the others. And we are doing this in a very serious way. You can see we are ISO certified. So basically all the security issues are cleared. So this is really industrial-ready technology. On a short scale, you can see really it's about the colors. The colors become a material. The material becomes a product. And then finally, we do the product on a CGI image that should be ready to go to your e-com systems. That's the idea. And today I'm going to show you a project that we did with Maloja. Maloja is a Bavaria-based small but high-end sportswear company. And we went with them through the whole process. So we went to color matching. We went through material scanning. We have an avatar in place. We rendered everything inside the DMI Studio. We have AI functionality to make it look perfect in the end. And then we have an image which can go into direct contact with your customer. And Maloja did, quite interestingly enough, the racing suits for, like, I think it's for a couple of years now already, the racing suits for the United States biathlon team. So it's a lot of technology inside these suits, right? So there's a lot of thinking, there's a lot of details, there's a lot of functionality in there. And obviously it's quite— it's an exciting sport. And I think there are so many parallels in the sport to what we are doing also. So here you get an impression of how this looks. I think we have no sound on the video.

Yeah.

So it's really, it's, it's an extreme sport between a lot of physical movement and then you need to really calm down in seconds for shooting this very small target. And it's about passion. It's about interplay. That is what they are saying. And this is what we are doing inside our system as well. And it starts with color management. This is basically the start of everything. If you go into design development, first thing that is done is basically people select colors, people define colors, people make sure hopefully that the colors are ready to go into production and into DPC. So these are very important steps and we have this all covered, right? So we can go, we can start with the creative process. So we can start with existing color systems. If it's Pantone or if it's Acroma or Coloro or what have you, we can measure colors. We are connected with all the devices basically that there are on the market. So it's Konica Minolta, it's Datacolor, it's X-Rite. And there is not really much more. And then basically we have a process of standardizing these colors. And with these standards, you are able to fill up your library. And once these colors are inside the library, we have two streams that we can serve. One is the DPC stream, and I will talk about this later. And the other one is, of course, the whole stream of physical production. So you need the color to go into lab dipping. And once the lab dipping is finished, you need to go into bulk production before then basically you come to the physical garment. And there are really some interesting cases around the color that we cannot go to today, but there's not much we are not covering on the color workflow, right? So basically there is all the answers for you. And we have some very big brands we are working with in this area with Impressive results, really impressive results in terms of shortening lead times, impressive results in having no claims anymore, and of course, it really results in saving money just on sending samples back and forth. So it's a really— it's something you really should look into, and it's a really— it's an easy win. It's not a complicated technology. It's very well established on the dye houses. It's very well established in terms of quality control. So basically you can take this, start it and expect results within months. Right. That's how far we can take this. And I think today we have connected about 1,000 dye houses inside the system and this is growing. So basically, there is no reason not doing it, right? And the results are really important. But let's go to the next very important thing. And this is, of course, 3D and raw material management. And again, we have a full pipeline for you. So again, we can start with the creative process. We are supporting all the scanners that are in the market. We are supporting also obviously the material authoring tools. So if it's Adobe Substance or Penelope or Aarane, basically then we can do again, we can do adjustments. So maybe if you need to do tiling, if you need to adjust colors, all that can be done in a special tool that we call 3D Magic inside the system. And then again, basically it goes into the library. You can organize it and then you can start sharing it, right? You can connect. And here's the connection to the color workflow. So basically, if we are going to recolor materials, you go into your color library, to your standards, you can recolor the material. And it's all a very standardized and clear workflow. Then you go into your 3D cut solutions. So it can be CLO, Browzwear, Style3D. We are also talking to Shoemaster. We are talking to iCut3D, also related to shoes. So it's a full bunch of software that we have. And then basically you can also take what you created and bring it back into DMX. So you again bring it into your library. So you have all the assets sitting in the library ready to be used in the next steps. When we looked at this a couple of years ago and then also last year, what we thought was missing a lot in these processes is something, a device that is needed that we can also give to suppliers in order to digitize materials. Because that's something what we see a lot at brands. They start the 3D journey. They try to do everything by themselves. And then if you start scaling up things, suddenly it's not 50 fabrics you need to digitize, but it's 500 or it's 1,000 or it's even more. And all the trims, all the details, right? So basically what we believe, something is missing that we can also give to suppliers to enable them to digitize these materials. And, um, The way we did it was basically we thought about this. Because we all have a phone, and the phone has today a lot of computational power, so we thought this is the way to go. The cameras are exceptional, and so we created a new device that works like this. So basically in this video you see the whole process. It's really not much more in the first steps, right? You take the material, you put it inside the device, you press a button on the app of the iPhone, and then basically the process runs. We produce like 90 pictures in 90 seconds. All this is calculated into a full PBR texture. We can also do videos inside this machine. So in order to give the designers an impression how the material behaves. We can do light simulations inside the device, also in video, in order to show you how the material behaves under the light. And the interesting part with this is basically we can separate the process of making the texture from the raw material. So you don't need to have a sample to prepare the texture. But you can do it basically just based on the data you have because you have a picture, you have several videos, and of course you have the full PBR maps to, to go on. And with this, of course, we have 3D in mind. Basically, you get the maps that are needed and then basically you're ready to go into the various systems. Here you can see how the video functionality is working. So as a designer, you get an idea of what the material actually is, right? So it's not like this dead, just flat picture, but you get an idea what happens on the material and what it means if you want to use it, right? And then basically all this gets scanned and it ends up in the library. So these are the scans that we did for the racing suit of Maloja. And they are sitting in the library ready to be used. And then we go into interaction. So at this project, we go with the materials into CLO. So basically, we built the racing suit in CLO. We bring all the material inside. We give you a fitting avatar for this process, right? Then basically— hello— and then basically we have also a complete model workflow. So basically we exchange the fitting avatar that you are using in CLO and basically bring it into a solution that we call 3D Studio. In 3D Studio, you have various possibilities. And also on the actual model workflow, you can see here how this works. So we have the fitting avatar where we can do the exact sizing you want to have. Then we have the 3D render, which is a full 3D render. Even the human is a 3D human. And then basically we can have on top of this a post-production in AI to get the last 5%, right? This is basically where the uncanny valley curve gets very steep. And with this, basically, we are getting to the point where we really cannot see anymore if it's a rendering or if it's a photograph. If everything is ready, you come back into DMI-X. You can see I have the garment that I prepared in CLO. I put it into the DMI-X Studio. We can have different light and camera setups, and these are also templated, right? So it's not like you have 10 people with 10 different setups producing pictures that you then have to retouch. But basically you will have your specialized camera settings, your brand lighting that you are using also maybe in the photo studio. We can rebuild it completely. And so in the end, it's a very straight process and we can automate it, right? So in the end, we have everything inside the system where we can bring things together and then basically move on. You can decide what model, what face you want to use. There's a full library of them. I think it's roughly 25 at the moment. And then basically we choose this character. And then basically the next step happens. We start the rendering. We produce the image. It's an online rendering system. We are rendering with V-Ray here. And when this picture is finished, it runs through the AI post-process. This is something we can also highly make up to measures that you want. So we can really look into what your brand pictures should look like, how they looked like in the past, and put this into this AI module. And then basically we come to results. And this is what ends up in the process. Right? So you have the full image. You can have different camera angles. You can jump onto very specific details if you want to. And everything was scanned with the device I've showed before. So basically, it gets really high-level and real inside this. I mean, look at the patches on the elbow, the seams. Everything is really nicely done. And that's basically the journey we did with Maloja. So basically, these images are now ready and they can be used. Of course, I mean, here they won't end up in an online store because they are made specifically for the team. But this is how far we can take this today, right? And if you need to see more and if you're interested, we are downstairs. So we're happy to show you the machine. We have the scanner downstairs. We can show you how it works. I can show you the process in studio. I can show you the process on the color side. Also very interesting. And yeah, come down and see us. Thank you. And I think we have the Slido app for some questions, or you can also ask me a question if you have one. That's also fine. Yes.

Concept from start to finish, to go through the steps of the process. We usually think of development and lead time in terms of months and sometimes years, and especially with technical products like that, that is something that we don't do in a 6-month timeframe. Did they find that this helped cut down on the amount of time that it took for them I think it's—

I mean, obviously, here is also a lot of technical development involved. There was, of course, a lot of testing around things, right? So this is, of course, something you do physical. But the interesting part here was that basically— and this is what they really use— so the biathlon people can use the finished renderings to go to sponsorships. They can exchange patches. They can exchange logos. So it's a very flexible way of working. And obviously, you have something to discuss on a very high level very fast, right? Even if then basically maybe materials get changed because they don't work the way you expect them in physical. But yes, and obviously, that's a special thing, right? If we are talking about normal garments, obviously, if you have everything ready, and everything is precise, basically you come to a picture within days, right? And you don't need to involve photographers. You don't need to involve studios, no models, no makeup, no dressers, all that kind of stuff, you know, is out of the window. And that's of course where I think personally, this is one of the biggest hurdles that we have to take in 3D. Is if we don't manage to get to the customer side of things, we have a big problem. Because then basically it's just not, you know, you don't get the full story. And we strongly believe that with this workflow we can, right? So we did another big project with a US brand here, and that was, well, I can't really say what it was, but What we saw really is that we had all the struggles that start even when the product is physically ready and goes into full shooting and in all this kind of stages gone, right? And that saves weeks. And that of course is very helpful. And I mean, for the brand side, they know best how much value is in there, right? I don't, you know, I can't really say if saving a week is what it means in dollars, right? But I'm quite sure a brand can.

Yes.

When scanning the fabric, does it read fabric properties such as weight or fiber content? This is the most asked question in the last 2 days. No, of course it doesn't, right? Visual machine, so basically it's doing photos and we are preparing the PBR textures. So the rest needs to be done in a proper lab, right? So basically you need to have testing equipment in order to do this, and we are following here the ISO standards. So basically a normal lab is able to get these values, but then again, of course, it's still a huge challenge to transfer these values into Browser, Clojure, and Style3D, because basically you have completely three different worlds. That's a challenge. We are trying to solve this. Also, we are looking at clustering. So basically, that's also something we believe is maybe a way forward to make this a little bit more easy and straightforward. But the machine, no, it doesn't capture that. Yes.

So I've seen your color app, if you will, if I can call it that, in previous presentations. I think that's wonderful. How has it been in terms of doing the color process and then bringing it into the 3D modeling? How has that been for you guys, and what has it supported from business process? Colors and other things.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, obviously it's very interesting. I mean, what we see a lot when we come to brands is you have, of course, you have the normal physical development and you have the 3D development. And in the end, they meet and they have nothing to do with each other, right? And obviously, that's not only disappointing, but it's also cost because you go into retouching again something that should already be perfect, right? And the way we handle this is basically we control the full process, right? So we don't let anything interfere inside the color process on the materials. And so basically, if you go into the rendering and you stick to a scenery that is not altering the colors, obviously, if you have a green light shining on your material, it will be green, right? That's how physics work. But if you stick to normal studio lighting, you will have a perfect color reproduction of what you had in your whole chain. So really, from measurement at the beginning to rendering in the end gives you the same result.

Hey, I had a quick question about the different fabric systems across CLO 3D, Style3D. Since you have to work across all of them, which one do you find the more accurate one, or is it just kind of the same in different units?

Who am I to answer that question? No, I think, so obviously with Clo and Browseware, we have the most experience. And I think both can do wonderful things, right? It's also, it's a lot depending on who does it and how much knowledge and skill they bring into this. And obviously for us, it's really, I mean, we don't we don't go the way that we want an artist to alter a material that is produced physically, right? What we want is to get the physical material and get this across the whole chain so that in the end, when they meet, they have something to do with each other, right? And I think this is something you can do in CLO, you can do in Browzwear, and probably you can do it also— I've seen it already also in Style3D. So that's That works, yeah. Right, no more questions? Everything answered? Perfect. So then thank you and come down and visit us and we show you some more. Thanks.