Digital Design Assets in Virtual + Gaming Environments | Epic Games, Crocs | PI Apparel

So before we start, who in the audience is a gamer?

Yeah.

All right. Not as many as I thought, but still.

Pac-Man, anyone? Asteroids? Okay.

So just so you know, the gaming market in 2024 was estimated to be at around $225 billion. It's quite a bit. Those would, would really enjoy that. There is an estimated 3 billion gamers in the world, right? And most of them are under 34. So for those who are not gamers, either you just aged yourself or you need to revisit your priorities because it's a bit— it's a, it's a space that is really important to to watch for brands, just even as human beings. This is something that is really— it's a new generation of consumers, of gamers. It is something that's becoming a huge topic. One of the big players, no pun intended, in this space is Epic Games. I've had the pleasure and the honor of working with the team for the past 2 years. Obviously, Unreal Engine is one of the— is the foundation of the technology that powers a lot of the video games. But it also powers a lot of the immersive experiences, the interactive experiences that are built around the products that we sell, right?

So I'm really excited to have this conversation today.

My name is Safir Belhally. I led digital innovation. My last role in the industry, which I left about 2 years ago, was leading digital innovation for VF Corporation and looking ahead, looking at the horizon and preempting the technologies that had the potential of— that have the potential of redefining the way we bring product to the market. I was looking at gaming. I was looking at real-time visualization as one of the key unlocks. So I'm really excited to have this conversation. Can we play the video?

Creation, elevation, bending space and time, a whole new reality.

It's always fun to watch.

And the 2025 sizzle reel will be shown at GDC very, very soon.

So we are obviously, as stakeholders, as innovators, as digital creatives, our interest is in not only building great digital twins, great digital assets, making sure that they look exactly like the products they're supposed to represent. So visual fidelity is really important. But what's also important is that we have an opportunity to leverage and deploy these assets into experiences, into activations way beyond just the internal use, right?

So this is why we're having these conversations here. But before we start, I just wanted to give each one of you 30 seconds to introduce yourself. Céline, you want to start up?

Hello, everyone. Thank you for staying and still being here this late day. And I'm sorry I sound like I've just smoked a packet of cigarettes. But it's been a long 2 days. My name's Céline Houghton. I work at Epic Games. Epic Games is fundamentally a software company. We develop software tools, though that software is used to make social interactive experiences, which is the new name for games if you didn't get the memo. And I also come together with the ecosystem, you know, this ecosystem of brands, retailers, and help them fully understand how they can leverage real-time. That's the short version, so I'll stop. Wow.

Okay. 30 seconds.

All right.

Andrew Bjornsen, former senior director of digital footwear and apparel at Vans. My career has been in footwear product design. The last 3 years have been in the digital space. I'm also on the board of governors at Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach. So kind of cool because they have an intersection of action sports, but they also have a really robust game art program. So Yeah, I don't know.

Good. Stephen Smith. It's kind of funny they asked me to be part of this because as I was looking back through the history, the Instapump Fury that I did at Reebok was one of the earliest to be included in some of the games in Kotaku. You could pick the color of your furies that the character could wear in the '90s. So it was interesting to see that and And even going forward into today, there's some funny Billie Eilish videos that she's wearing them too. So it's kind of funny to see that reach for like 30 years of this design being integrated into tech and games.

So Steven, I really enjoyed your talk this morning when you spoke about Shoemaker, when we spoke about Maya and the fact that we don't need to be able to do fly-throughs through our product. The tools, as we've been using this, as they've evolved to be more general tools for the creation of assets to more specific tools, but also the visual— so not only the asset creation tools, but also the visualization tools have come a long way, right? And we've learned from different industries. You know, the other products have come. I remember at a certain point we were experimenting with DeltaGen. You know, it was the promise of real-time visualization. That was a tool that was made for the automotive industry.

It didn't really work for footwear and fashion. It just didn't, right?

So can we— can you tell us a little bit about how you've seen these tools evolve and what you're excited about?

I mean, it's interesting to think about gaming as part of it because it's very funny. At Reebok, they got us these $100,000 Silicon Graphics workstations to do the alias on. And in the end, it was too complex. So we actually networked and linked them and played Flight Simulator and fought each other across the building. So it ended up in gaming. But I think it's interesting as we create things in 3D with the digital design that we're creating these assets, so they already exist. So why wouldn't you then easily be able to transfer that to business partners like gaming where people could wear the actual product or actually work together with you to design something or designing them within the game to possibly create a special variation, another purse, something. So that, that evolution of the digital tool, which I think is critical, and it almost seems like they should intersect at some point, you know, with sport and fashion and, and gaming. And, you know, it was always the thing I think of like Beat Saber, for example, where you're up running around and everything. It certainly makes sense to try to integrate it into more of the VR world. And if there was a way to modify or add on to your shoes these devices, it would be, it would be pretty cool, you know. I mean, the hardest thing is you, you don't want one to fail before the other after an initial investment in electronics versus your footwear. So if the footwear fails, you lost your electronics, or if the electronic fails, you just have another pair of sneakers. So I think that how to integrate it all is one of the key, key challenges that we can do.

Awesome. Um, Andrew, you took over, uh, a few years ago at Vans, you took over the, the digital product creation team, uh, the Flashback. So we go way back. Um, the— I started the team, I created the team back, I think, in 2011. Yep. And so it's been really interesting, really fascinating to see kind of the evolution of that effort over there. What's your take on the tools, on the tool side?

Yeah, so really talented team coming from a lot of different industries, entertainment, Halloween masks, some footwear designers who came in through Modo. So everyone's able to use the tool that they're most comfortable with. And/or leverage a type of product to that designer because, you know, maybe ZBrush is the best way to get something really organic and sculpty. I, you know, I think seeing how they create is super exciting, but I also see the limitations of doing it from a visual tool standpoint because of the practicality. Then how do you make the actual thing and/or the time in the season when you're Are you doing it for an initial line review? Are you doing it for a final line review? And the design itself is not yet finished, so you're rushing a 3D model to give the potential of what it might be. But even crafting it three-dimensionally can be rather labor-intensive. So, you know, we've seen that evolve in the space. And how then when people are interested, they start to pull and divide it like, oh, can we get that for e-com yet?

Can we do this?

And you're like, no, this is still the concept one. This isn't the final one yet. Yet. So there's that challenge of how to, you know, evolve it through each stage. And in conversations today, even, you know, if you go create, make, and sell, maybe those are in— like, maybe they actually are divided. Maybe there really isn't this true pipeline of, like, you can actually connect those in a 3D world. Maybe because a creative needs to be so loose and fluid, that needs to be one thing, like it is these days with pen, paper, Sketchbook Pro, Procreate, whatever it might be, and then hand it off. I know it seems idiotic and asinine to talk about that in a 3D and digital conference, but let the tools that are currently there be empowered by the people who have them, as opposed to the other way around. You know, Stephen said, like, don't drop a lot of money on these things and then it doesn't get used, because then management goes, this isn't It's this idiom, either we get rid of the people or we get rid of the equipment, or maybe we get rid of both and we'll go back to the way we just did it before. But yeah.

I remember the conversations around pipelines and workflows was, those were some of the more heated conversations because, you know, we were trying obviously to be streamlining things and to make sure, you know, the pipeline was aligned, you know, everyone was aligned. But we understood very quickly that, everyone came with their own set of tools. And it didn't matter how they created the asset if you could align on standards to visualize them.

So I don't know if this is going to jump way ahead or not. But what we did do was we looked at what the tools were and the potential. I mean, just like that reel where you're like, holy crap, I'm seeing a vision of something that's further out. We created a substream with, you know, XP or experiments. I guess everyone's doing it these days. But we had that so designers could, like, go through this design phase and create what they want to create because they saw an insight, they had a need, and they did it. So we don't have, like, a traditional advanced concept team, but we wanted to do experiments for all. And if a designer came with a project that was, like, interesting enough, or however we deemed it to be, like, this talks to this season, this thing, let's launch that. We actually would pull that into the 3D team and create a full experience. And showcase these things that were unbriefed to say, you know, the team is really talented, like footwear designers, the 3D teams and all this stuff. We can do more than you think we can do. And then use Twinmotion even and put stuff in and create these environments and these scenes that people can walk into this experience in a room that's more than a showroom and has all this stuff happening and just get people excited. It was very exciting.

Right, Salihan, I love how things come together, the timing of things, because Epic Games announced yesterday that Crocs are now available in Fortnite as cosmetics.

Happy.

Can you tell us a little bit about this new way of deploying assets into the Fortnite or into the gaming space? Because this was not possible just as footwear itself, right? I'm told.

Yeah, it is beautifully timed, isn't it? Well, look, this conference, this room shows that people are passionate about footwear. People are passionate about design. That doesn't stop in a digital space. That doesn't stop in a social space. And we've always known that in Fortnite, you know, the cosmetic function, the cosmetic ability to, you know, to turn up and choose your outfit has always been a huge part of, of the game, of the gameplay, of the ecosystem. You know, players love to have a closet full of who they want to be that day. And this new functionality, it just shows that technology evolves, gaming spaces evolve. That the value, the opportunity is going to continue to increase. And us having this new function where you can wear whatever shoe, whatever sort of footwear you want with your existing outfits has— we've been blown away by how popular it's been. Like we always knew that there's a passion for footwear and we've historically partnered with all the iconic footwear brands through, you know, through full outfits, through full cosmetics. This allows us to be even more diverse and bring in even more communications of design. And the community, which is 900 million players, have like loved it. Like it's been even more popular than we could have imagined. And so you can, you know, walk around in your Darth Vader or your Spider-Man outfit with Peely slippers or your Jordan Nikes or your Adidas and Crocs now, which I personally am very excited by. And it will continue like— and we, you know, we'll— we're very excited by the fact that we can have more and more diverse bespoke expressions of footwear and players can digitally identify who they are in new and exciting ways. And they want to, they absolutely want to. And it's not just about Fortnite and the Fortnite ecosystem. This goes across, you know, any sort of strong community-led social gaming space. People want to turn up how they want to turn up and digitally develop their identity.

Yeah, ultimately it's about self-expression and that carries from the real world into gaming, into virtual spaces. Stephen, we had a nice chat earlier on about some of the ways these digital tools can allow us to explore new paths for creativity and design, whether it is digital technologies or embedded technologies or tools. You had shared an interesting story that I thought was interesting with the little device that you put on the skateboard.

Yeah, it was interesting when I was at Adidas, I was doing wearables in the embedded innovation team there. And it was very funny because they— the rest of the team had come from DuPont and they were fiber people, so they made OEM fiber. And then the other half were electrical engineers. None of these people had ever made a commercial product. They were OEM suppliers. Uh, and we're building the one system, the My Coach Elite team system, and I you know, as the person who had been in the commercial side of the business forever and as a designer and a dreamer, I kept telling them like, what are we doing after this? And they're like, what do you mean? We're going to perfect it. We're going to do version 1.1. I said, well, you know, you're in a corporate environment now delivering a consumer product. They're going to want to know what's next, right? And they were like, well, we'll just keep perfecting it. I said, you're all going to lose your jobs if not thinking what's next because they want to know there's a pipeline of ideas and concepts and, and to grow this business. And it seemed to be an elusive thought to them. And they were smart people, which was disappointing. So what I would do in between projects was dream like, what could this be? Where could it go? What could you do with the suit? What could you do with the apparel? And they made the little myCoach Pod that went in to basically replace your heart rate monitor that went in your shoe that counted steps and did your speed and distance. And I saw that thing, I'm like, and then Patrick Nielsen, who was the president at the time, was like, we need to connect to 14-year-old American boys, you know, alternative sports people. And they don't give a crap about myCoach. Running and training and all that. But I went and asked the team who was working on the Pod device, like, what does this thing actually measure? And they're like, oh, it does all this. I'm like, well, why don't we use that, right? So I had this idea, like, what can measure all of these things like g-forces, rotation, speed, relative location? It can broadcast all of that data to your phone or an electronic device. Why don't we embed this in a skateboard? And so I looked at the deck, I'm like, oh, you know, you could laser cut or route a thing in the, in the board, but, um, how do you do that practical to the consumer at the skate shop or whatever, right? You don't want to have to have them running a router. So I measured the thickness in the device and it was the exact same thickness as a 3/8 standard riser. So I created this basic like little tray with a drawer in it that the pod slid into. And by also putting it inside that riser, it was under the truck, so it was protected against grinds and bashing and everything. So this thing could actually measure rotation, speed, distance. And the way, the way I thought about it was like you could have this skateboard Now you modify it with the simple piece that is a standard that you can get off the shelf at the, at the skate shop and have it transmit the data real time to your phone. Or you could have it transmit to social media like, oh, I just did a 270 kickflip. And yeah, you could broadcast it to your friends. It'd be like, well, actually you only did 240. But the other thing that would be kind of cool about it is it could replicate what the board was doing in an animation or a graphic. You wiped out, like, hell dude, I just took 3 G's when I did that grind and fell down on the ground, you know? And it could also give you training potentially, you know, as you try to do a kickflip and like you got it to this point, what could you do next to learn these tricks and things? And it just seemed to make a lot of sense to me. And it captured that nontraditional sport athlete that Adidas was trying to get after at the time. So I did a special handcrafted board, everything to go with it. And then they went and showed it in Germany. Everybody was jazzed up about it for their big ideation festival. And then they were like, "Ja, we got nobody to build the app." And so that was the end of it, which kind of sucked because it was such a cool idea and a way to continue to keep that pipeline exciting of this wearables thing beyond just a soccer team. But it just goes to show, you know, it takes these leaps of faith for innovations to take place. I mean, they had the hardware ready to go and it was a disappointment. And, you know, the whole little pod with Nike+, the Adidas MyCoach, it's all kind of went the way of the Polar heart rate monitor. You know, it's kind of sad because as a designer and ideator, you saw this potential and what this thing could be and its reach to make it bigger story than what it actually was. And I think a lot of these technologies that we work on hold such potential. It's just getting people to believe in it or understand it or see where these things could go and be much more than what they are. And, you know, there's always a moment in time for an innovation and Maybe it'll come back. I don't know, but I got the board at home.

Yeah, I was going to say you should hold on to that idea. Maybe some game companies would be interested in developing that. Who knows?

Yeah, it'd be pretty cool because you see simulators. You remember somebody did the snowboard thing that you have in your living room, but why not make it the real snowboard? Now that we have so much connectivity and Bluetooth capabilities, you can really start to integrate all your sports things into this. Now it all becomes seamless of the virtual world with the real world and life and activities and sports. It starts to bring it all back out of the living room and into the world.

I love that. I remember one of the last projects I worked on at VF was a project in which for Timberland, it was a Timberland Fortnite collaboration where we used Fortnite as a design tool. It was way before UEFN. You had to cobble together fridges and rocks and things like that to be able to create something that looks like a shoe. And we actually used— yeah, we used the game as a way to experiment and explore new concepts, what we call Meta Boots. And it's using non-traditional approaches and workflows to to experiment and explore non-traditional outputs is possible because of these technologies.

You know what fascinates me? I love cars and I love car racing. It's so cool to see things like Gran Turismo influencing the concept car world. If you follow anything to do with the concept cars, the car designers are building the cars within the virtual game environment. And then they're actually going out building the show cars. So they build like functional versions of the game cars to run at like Goodwood Festival of Speed up the hill. And I mean, that shows you the potential of what we could do even in footwear where we can build a special version that's in the game and then you do it, you know, it, you can then grade the acceptability of the design or the colorway and have people vote within the game which ones they pick most.

You don't even have to—

you can do it subtle, or whatever colorway they pick, and then you make that colorway secretly, or you can earn it in the game, and then the real one exists.

I mean, there's so many cool opportunities to connect all these things and, um, to be able to go be so much more directly from, you know, product development. Yeah, into, you know, into a customer environment. Yeah, but never need to commercialize that product, but get so much, you know, vital, important insight by, you know, well, you know, people use their feet, don't they? You know, they'll vote with their feet, and it's real simple as them, you know, picking. Yeah, and you see it in the movie, you can see it daily, um, because it's such a, a visited space in most instances. You can, you know, the feedback that you get, and then you can feed that back into the product development stage or, you know, or what you go to market with.

I think too, like, the freedom that virtual and digital allows is unbound, right? Unbound by earthly physics, unbound by manufacturing constraints, and projects that we've seen, whether they're student work or interns who came in and did stuff and said, oh, I'm going to design a shoe for this anime character or this video game character, they can go wild. And then you're— we reset our mind as we help them through their project to be like, cool, I actually don't have to make this. And how do you get them to be free and liberated? And then you can sort of, if you to the point of like, well, can you want something to connect and sell later, reverse engineer to something that's like, okay, there was a show car, and show cars never come to market looking as cool as a show car. Hopefully it's not the Pontiac Sunfire. No offense to anybody if you work in GM, but like, that was a cool concept car. But anyway, okay, so yeah, I think that the liberation that happens in thinking in otherworldly, like, universes or lithospheres is something that can refresh a lot of energy because right now we're sort of stuck in a world that's challenged and is all about retros and re-releases, which is cool when you see your shoe come back. But as Steven said this morning, you're competing with your younger self and where's the innovation and where are the things that are pushing us into the future?

That's a great segue. Thanks. We didn't practice this.

Nope.

So yeah, I think some could argue that footwear needs a reboot, product in general, product and experiences, you know, understanding that you can put yourself as a brand at the intersection of product and experiences. You know, maybe through gaming or other things. You know, that's something that is definitely something that, you know, we should all consider. I remember, Steven, this morning you had an expression.

Was it fuck the system?

Yeah, pretty much. You need to think differently. You need to do things differently, right? What is the one thing that each one of you is the most excited about in terms of technology that unlocks new possibility at the intersection of product and experience.

David? I do think that ability to accumulate data from users is important. Still 3D printing. You know, it's still in its infancy, getting past the plasticization of the component in the part and product. But if you look at it, being able to 3D print molds, getting things quicker to market, having kids see it sooner, having it more fluid so that you could do rapid changes. I mean, I, I think of Kanye, which was very funny in some ways, is, you know, he would drop an album and one of his rap buddies would critique it and he'd take it back to pull it off the market and then remix it overnight based on their criticism. I mean, I think with a lot of the digital tools and that ability, you could do that. And sometimes even if it's through the, through the, through the gaming, I think still scoring, scoring points in the game gets you discounts to the product that you're wearing. You know, I think there's so many cool things. It's hard to say one thing. It's so many cool things that you could do with it. But anyway, there's—

I'm going to go large. Like, well, you know, large as in conceptual maybe. But I think it's super, super exciting to We're at a moment in time where there's such an excitement and energy around building digitally, like not just products but worlds, environments, 'cause you can, like, you know, it's getting easier and easier and easier to build digital environments, scaled digital environments. And we kind of talk about this future, and I don't want to say the M word, but I'm going to have to say it. You know, we talk about this future. And we, we talk about the metaverse and how if we, if we have this underlying integrated technology, then it can all come together. So I, I love the concept and I think it's super exciting for, for IP and for brands that now if you're bold and you're brave, you could, you could be part of the DNA of that build, you know, through getting your assets out there and, and making your assets available to creators. And being part of how people turn up in these digital worlds from the very beginning. And then as these worlds develop and grow in the same way, if, you know, if you go to the center of town and you people watch, you know, you are seeing this massive mix up of people's choices. But I bet you'll see hell of a lot of sneakers, a hell of a lot of denim jackets because that is part part of the DNA of, of who we are now and how we dress. And we have the opportunity to do that in virtual worlds. And I think that's super exciting, giving creators what they need to be creative with existing assets so that there is this makeup. We're beginning to produce this makeup and these worlds and these visuals that you kind of have no control over. Like there's an organicness to it that I think is super exciting. Exciting. And then in virtual world, you can sit down and you can people watch and start to see how you see these recurring themes. And I think that's, that's going to be super exciting.

Andrew, you have 30 seconds.

Right in the middle. There's a lot that was said there that I totally agree with, and I think it is about the experiences, right? Coming from a brand like Vans, oftentimes when you talk to people about Vans, you're like, well, what's cool? Why Vans? Why You know, like if you're interviewing YNAs and they're like, oh, when I was a kid, my dad dropped me off at the Warped Tour and it was a formative moment in their life. And sadly, that's gone away, although it's coming back this summer for 3 stops. But the ability, as you just said, to create globally connective experiences that the brand can step into. You know, we've partnered with, with Skate, with Riders Republic, with Need for Speed and played with them and given them assets and see those come to life into the games is really neat. It's really exciting because now you're seeing what came off the digital tree, more fruit being put into different places. And even like Need for Speed, going in there and seeing how you can, you can do your car and you're just taking this big shape and you're scaling it over and you're color blocking it and you're adding logos and stuff. I'm like you could have a sneaker creator and you can just do your own shoes. And then like, like you're saying, like consumers will be voting on them or whatever. If it's something with the brands, maybe there's like that connectiveness about how you get back to that consumer being sneaker king or something.

Thank you all.

I saw some questions. Do we still have time for questions or are we— One question.

Wow.

All right, make it a good one. Okay, there we go.

All right, everyone's—

everything's been upvoted once.

I like—

so I'm gonna take a leap here and say go with the third one. How do 3D experts support artists in the gaming industry, and could the footwear industry adopt similar strategies to support designers? Clarification.

3D experts from the gaming industry and what they do for 3D gaming and how could that help in the footwear?

Is that sort of the question?

If I understand correctly.

Go ahead.

I think that, you know, it boils down— if, you know, if you want diverse artistry to come into the gaming industry, if the gaming industry wants diverse artistry to come into the gaming industry, the gaming industry has to make tool adoption and participation easier. So, you know, so we're kind of boiling it down to the creator space and to user-generated content. And, and, you know, two of the biggest platforms, gaming platforms, do that. Like Roblox has its creator tools and they support them by having this wrapper around that creator space. Fortnite has its creator tools and, and there's a lot of support and, you know, pipelines are developed so that you don't have to be a, you know, a AAA games company. You don't have to be a, you know, incredibly experienced UE developer, but you can still very much participate in the gaming space. And, you know, and the reason we do it is to be able to leverage that, that incredible creativity and to, to support creators. So there's diverse content that people want to access.

Yeah, what I read into this, and, and, you know, everyone may interpret it differently, but, uh, this idea of empowerment, right? Um, software tools, interfaces are getting more and more intuitive and more accessible. And so if you think about tools like, for instance, MetaHuman, which is a tool that maybe 5, 10 years ago, a studio, a production studio would have invested millions of dollars in developing and keeping it for themselves. Now everyone can access it for free unless you make a lot of money of it. Right. So but I think it's important to to also talk about how the tools, as they are becoming more available, more accessible to the masses, encourage more creators, more creators to contribute and to participate, whether they're footwear designers or game designers or find themselves at the intersection.

All right, I think we are at time.

Thank you so much for—

Thank you.

—gracing us with your wisdom and your knowledge.