The Real time Revolution | Trapdoor Creative | PI Apparel

My name is Nick Cottle. This is Barry Zundel. We are representing Trapdoor Creative. Trapdoor Creative, if you don't know already, is a software solution provider as well as a full 3D studio, full-service 3D studio. We have been around for about 9 years doing a lot of different things for probably many of your different companies as well as other fashion brands. Service providers, or services providers around the fashion space. We have the opportunity today to talk a lot about some of the software we do provide. We're going to talk about Stage, which is a big piece of the real-time revolution. I just wanted to take a minute to introduce a little bit about my background and Barry's, and then I'm going to turn it over to Barry to— really go into it. This will be a little different than some of the other presentations you've seen. As a think tank, we want it to be a little bit more casual. We want you to feel like you can ask some questions and go through it. We do have quite a bit to cover, but we do want to really leave quite a bit of time at the end to kind of open it up. So as we're going through these things, if you have thoughts or questions or things you want to bring up, please jot them down so that we can get to them towards the end, and we can dive a little bit into that. I'm Nick Caudill again. I was at Nike for a number of years, at HP before that for a number of years. I'll let Barry give you a little bit about his background, much more extensive on the 3D space for a long time. But we're really excited to be here again. For those that are just coming in, please know that There is quite a bit to cover, so we just wanted to get started. But thank you for coming in and taking a seat. Barry, you want to take it? Sure.

So yeah, appreciate everybody being here. We're excited to be here. This is the first time we've been to Milan, but we're really excited to be here and show you what we have today. My name is Barry Zundel, CEO of Trapdoor Creative. A little bit about myself, my background. So I started out at Disney for 10 years. In 3D doing video games and cinematics and pipeline development and all kinds of stuff like that. So I spent 10 years at Disney doing that. After that, moved to Pixar Animation Studios where I was a character technical director. So I would model and rig the characters and work with the animators to make sure that all those characters that you know and love work right and animate correctly. So I did a lot of that. And then also after that, went over to Nike where I was a digital lead or a 3D lead in a bunch of different categories, so worked with a lot of different different categories to help them transition from 2D to 3D and utilize all the latest 3D tools to really streamline that process there at Nike, which was a great experience. The one thing that kind of was a common thread throughout that whole process was the need for fast 3D tools. Whether it was making movies, making video games, or making product, 3D tended to be that common thing that wove through them, but also the need to have really fast tools and be able to move really quickly, make decisions quickly. Now, that changes when you're working in video games, and then you move to movies, and then you move to product design. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. But I've been in the 3D industry for 25 years, 20— well, more than that. But I love where the 3D world is headed. I love where the technology is headed and what it can do to really streamline the process of product design. So that's just a little bit about— us and our company. After Nike, we started Trapdoor, like Nick said, almost 9 years ago to really take what we saw in the software industry and the needs of the software in those processes and really try to bring it to product design, because there's a lot of technology that's been used in movies, been used in video games for a long time, and some of those things translate to product design. Some of them do not. And a lot of times we take all of 3D as a big ball, and we say, it's 3D. It works here. It works here. It works here. And that's not necessarily the case. And so at Trapdoor, what we wanted to do is really leverage the latest in graphics technology and see how that can be leveraged inside of the product design industry. So the first thing, just about us a little bit. So we do 3 things. We create 3D content. So we help companies if they have 3D that needs to be built, animations done, renderings to be done, all of that kind of stuff. We help companies do that. We have an extensive background in doing that. We also create interactive content. So whether it's a digital retail space, an interactive customer engagement, or an activation, we've worked in AR, we've worked in VR, we've worked in 360 video. We've, we've done all of it. And in addition to, you know, digital retail spaces or digital showrooms and those kinds of things. So that's the second thing that we do. And then as we built this out over the years, as we were working with all these companies, especially with brands that a lot of you are part of, we really realized that this technology— we kept doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same request over and over again. I need to move faster. I need to see things sooner. I need to be able to interact with my 3D and not just see it as an image or something like that. And so that's where we really started about 2 and a half years ago, 3 years ago, we really started to jump into software development tools that utilize real-time rendering to streamline the product development process, especially around visualization. That's really where we focused. And so that's kind of the 3 things that we do as a company. And so as we talk about this, there's— we talk about real-time. We focus on speed. We want it to be fast, but we want it to be accurate. We want it to be realist— or we want it to have as much realism as possible. And we don't want you to give up that realism and that quality for speed, that those things are starting to come together where we can use the technology to do those things at the same time. So that's just a little bit about the company. So over the last 8 years, 8 to 9 years, we've primarily been a project company, like I said. This is just a sampling of some of the stuff that we do. We create interactive experiences. We create digital content. But like I said, we saw a large gap in the industry where you could use 3D. You got to a certain point, and then all of a sudden, it was like, uh-oh, there's this big elephant in the room of rendering, creating the visuals using that 3D. We can use it for manufacturing. We can create the 3D for manufacturing. But as soon as we get to that visualization part, all of a sudden it comes to a screeching halt. And that's when a lot of companies will reach out to external companies, say, we need this thing done. We need marketing shots. We need whatever it is. And then you end up kind of using the 3D that you had, but a lot of times reusing it or rebuilding it from the get-go. So as we looked into what this was all about and what this technology was all about, it really is about speed. and it's really about what we can use this bleeding-edge technology to do to speed up your process, to get you to market faster, to get you to decisions faster, to get those processes in your pipeline to go quicker and quicker because you can see it earlier and earlier. So that's what we really love to do. We really love to dive deep with companies and look at how this real-time technology can really affect it. So one of the kind of maxims, if you want to call it, that we have at our company is this. I saw this once when I was at Disney, and it really kind of resonated with me. There's a better way to do it. Find it. A lot of times, we get stuck in a rut of doing it the way it's always been done. The problem is, is technology is just a very fast-moving stream, right? It's hard to adopt those things really quickly, But at the same time, we need to be in a mentality of, I have to be willing and able to adopt this technology and bring it into my pipeline so that I can stay ahead of the curve, so that we can stay at the forefront of things. Because this technology is moving so fast that if you don't get in and jump in, you'll get left behind very quickly. We all want stable pipelines. We want things that we can rely on. But at the same time, that there's technology out there that can really streamline what you're doing and what we're doing with product development. And so we, as a company, we aren't married to any specific technology. We love always looking further and faster and looking ahead and saying, what's out there that can really help us? Tools change, processes change, the way that we use 3D changes. And especially now, it's very rapid. About how that works. And so technology is constantly getting better. Ways that we can produce are getting constantly better. And our job is to help you follow that, is to help you progress with that. And that's what we do. That's what we do as a company. So we're really excited about that. Now, does anybody know what this date is? March 19th, 2014. Probably nobody does, right? So I was, at the time, I was at Nike, and I was working, and I had been in video games for a long time. So I'd been in video games for 10 years, and I'd been looking at all the technology. I always wanted to make movies. I did that later, but been in video games, and this date was really important because for a long time in technology, video game technology and movie technology and what you could do with 3D was very far apart. Video game technology, you'd see video games, and you'd be like, yeah, it looks like a video game. The graphics were not all that great. They were decent, but they weren't that great. And then you would see movies, and you're like, how do they make Transformers? How do they make Toy Story, all those things? And you just see them, and you go, this is amazing. So the technology, there was a big gap there. March 19, 2014 was the date that they released Unreal Engine 4. And if you know anything about Unreal Engine, It is an incredibly powerful visualization engine. I don't like to call it a video game engine because it's not really about video games. It's about two things. It's about realistic visualization and interactivity, right? And on March 19, 2014, I had actually been part of the beta on Unreal Engine 4. And I was at Nike at the time. And I was putting shoes in there and apparel in there. I was like, oh my gosh, this is absolutely mind-blowing what I can get and how real it can be. This is almost 10 years ago that this was happening, right? And so at Nike, I would start putting these things in and showing people. And it was a really funny situation. I showed one of my colleagues, check this out. He said, where did you render that? And I said, I didn't. It's live. Like, you're looking at it. It's right there. And he's like, no, but where did you render it? I said, no, it's right there in front of you. It's interactive. And there was a mind shift all of a sudden that went, wait, we have to shift the way we think about rendering, about visualization, about visuals in general, and how we generate those things, whether it's consumer-facing, whether it's internal. We have to really think about that. And so that, in 2014 when that happened, that was a total shift in the way that the landscape of 3D really worked. There are shots in movies now being done inside of Unreal Engine. And so you can see where this technology, where that gap used to be, now that gap has come very close to being almost parity. Where you can do visual effects, movie-quality visual effects inside a real-time video game engine, visualization engine, and not see a difference between those two things. And you're really seeing that technology come together. And so when Unreal Engine 4 was released, that was when I realized this is the future of where graphics is going. This is the future of where visualization is going. No longer do I have to sit here and push a button and walk away from it and wait for a render to happen. I can literally see it in front of me as I'm trying to make decisions. That was a big deal. So this is just a video showing when that came out what we could do. And unlike anything else before it, you see this and you go, OK, it looks kind of like a video game. But at that point, nothing like this could be done in real time to that point. You were like, this is absolutely incredible. This looks like a movie. And you could pause it. You could move the ship a little bit over. I don't like this camera shot. You could pause it, move the camera over, hit play. There it goes. You could move a character over. You could change lighting. You could do everything in real time. You could literally do it as you were watching it. And this is totally different, and I'll get into this in just a minute with what we did at Pixar. But you had incredibly lifelike graphics. You had movie-quality visualization. All running on a computer at 60 frames a second. This is rendering live in front of you. I hope you guys can kind of understand what that means, that instead of every time you push that button to render a piece of apparel and it takes 2 minutes to render that image, and you're like, oh, OK, that didn't take too long, this is doing full HD graphics with everything running 60 times every second it's rendering that in front of you, OK? So this is the difference in real-time. So you see this, and you look at it, and you're going, This is storytelling, but storytelling in real time, OK? We could continue to watch all this stuff. You can see it on YouTube. But storytelling was never going to be the same. 3D graphics would never be the same. The way that we interact with digital media was never going to be the same. And this was kind of that starting point of like, whoa, this is new, OK? So what we started to see is things like this, where all of a sudden you had interactive scenes, interactive capabilities, where you look at it and you're like, this is real. I can walk through this. This was a demo where you could just walk through it, right? Real-time lighting, bounced lighting, global illumination, all those things that I used to just— I used to push the button, go home for the night to get that rendered image. Now it could just happen as I was walking through it. I could be moving through that space looking at it and just being amazed. Oh my gosh, I can change the lighting. I could change the time of day outside. right? This really just made us go, this technology is going to change the way we do visualization, the way that our customers interact with our products, the way that we design things, the way that we move things through a pipeline and make decisions. Just, it was incredible, an incredible time in 3D graphics.

And I would just add to that as well, one of the things that we, when we talk with all of you out there as well as other brands and whatnot, The biggest piece of what this means is 3D in the past has been this thing that people aren't adopting because there isn't the right story being told around it. It's taking too long. It looks too video gaming. It's not as quality. It's complicated. I can't do it. To be able to tell the story, you have to have the right visuals. You have to have the ability to go to your leadership with the quality matching exactly what they're getting from any other process they're flowing. And that is what this really starts to bring. Not just really allowing you to do 3D, but allowing you to actually do 3D at parity of where you're at with all your other processes and flows, which will reduce your amount of time to market, which will reduce your amount of spend, all the investment that's being placed in photo shoots and all of these other things. So that's a big, big change, big, big shift, and to believe and know as a company, you have to do a lot of storytelling into your business, not just to your customers, that's like the dream, right, but to your internal teams as well.

Yeah, and I remember in time back when I was at Nike, we would do things where we would build rig rooms. I don't know if you guys have ever done that, but rooms that were set up with mannequins and all the outfits and it was decked out and you could go in and you where you could basically get an idea of what the seasonal release was going to be like and what the feel was of the whole thing. Those took weeks and weeks to put together. And you walk through them, and it's done, and that's it. And they were great. But now with 3D and leveraging 3D design, you can do those things and do them over and over and over again in virtual spaces, in virtual environments, telling that story to not only internal people but external people as well. In a much more realistic way and in a much more engaging way than just walking through and seeing some mannequins with some stuff standing there. So now we have all this power and everything. And I just want to show this real quick. This is now Unreal Engine 5. I don't know how many of you guys have seen this. But this is all running in real time. This is not rendered. This is not like a movie. This is running on a PlayStation 5— well, this one's on the Xbox Series X, right? This is running in real time. So this is— you could pause it and you can move the camera, or you could pause it and slide the car over, or you could change the lighting at the time of day. Like, this is all happening in real time. This is movie quality stuff that you're seeing now in real-time graphics. And so the reason why I show this is not because, hey, look how cool real-time graphics is. It's because I want you to understand that the technology gap has come parity, that you can do realistic photoreal-looking rendering at scale in real time, just like you could do by pushing a button and sending it off to a render farm. That's going to save you massive amounts of time, iteration loops, all of that kind of stuff. And I love this. I could watch this forever. But let's move on because we got some time. But the question was around this, OK, all this stuff is cool. It looks great. How do we— the question now is, How do we leverage it? There's this cool technology out there. It's super fast. It's really great. It does visualization amazing. But how do we leverage it? What do you do to leverage that? How do we use this power that we have, or this technology that we have, to not only tell the story of our brand, but help our design pipeline move forward, help products move forward, make quicker decisions, and allow people, also our customers, to interact with it as well? OK? So I want to talk about something important here, 3D creation pipelines. And I want to talk about the difference between movie pipelines and product design pipelines. Because a lot of times, what I saw coming from Pixar, when I came from Pixar to Nike, I saw that they were deep into 3D. They were really pushing 3D. But a lot of the processes that they were trying to use— and this is maybe in your company as well— is was geared towards what they do in movies or visual effects, right? And to me, when I got there, I realized we're doing the same thing. There's still vertices, edges, faces, polygons, materials, lighting, all that kind of stuff. But we're doing it totally different. And we need it to be totally different. This cannot be a movie pipeline. It moves too fast. For example, Pipeline— well, I'll get that in a second. Pipelines and processes have to be geared towards what your outcome is, right? You can't say, well, Pixar made a movie like this, so that's how I'm going to visualize my shoes, or my apparel, or my bags, or whatever. It's a different process. There's things that happen in movies or video games that work differently than they do in a product development pipeline. And sometimes that causes problems, and also it causes— adoption to not happen as quick as it should because those processes don't fit with the way we work in product design. And so what we looked at is we said, wait, this shouldn't happen. These tools need to be geared towards the product that we're trying to do, the speed that we're trying to move, the way that we move as a product design company. 3D is not 3D is not 3D. And that means just because it's used that way in movies doesn't mean I can use it in a product design pipeline the same way. or visual effects, or video games, or whatever. I need to have that tailored to what I'm doing and the way that I'm doing it. So when I was at Pixar, I was a character TD, and I was in charge of modeling and rigging Mama for The Good Dinosaur. The reason why I bring this up is because I spent 13 months just building the model and the rig to animate her. 13 months, right? And in that model, we were modeling like the little tiny wrinkles in her eyes and little tiny things on her teeth and like even parts that you would never ever see, like wrinkles in the bottom of her feet, right? There was things that we were just detailing so much and we would just create and create and create and go back and forth and the director would sit behind me and I'd, you know, take the back of her head and shape it just a tiny bit, little things like that, 13 months, right? Everything on there was just meticulously detailed. Now, that's great for a movie, right? Even when you'll never see the bottom of her foot, right? And I spent a week modeling all that stuff, getting all those wrinkles right and getting notes. You'll never see that. But for a movie, that works great. I can spend 13 months on that character. And there's other artists that are spending 13, 14 months on other characters, right? In a product design pipeline, that does not work. You can't take that amount of time. You can't spend 13 months working on a single model of a shoe or on an apparel design. It has to move quicker, and the tools need to work quicker so that you can actually do that. There were countless reviews that you would go through for this process. It took a long time. Movies take 3 to 6 years to make. Products don't. Products, you have season after season, SKU after SKU, colorway after colorway. You got to move. You got to get to that next one, and you got to go, OK? So thinking about this 3D in terms of the way it used to work, we got to think about it differently in the way that it works now. Just as an example, so another movie I worked on was Brave. And for example, I want to ask this. So each frame— You guys know how animation works, right? It's like the flip book that you draw a ball on a page and draw another one, brrr. Every frame that gets rendered for an animation, you have to send that to the render farm. Now, Pixar has about 2,000 computers, OK, 24,000 cores of computing power, right? So that's a lot of computing power to be able to render. How many of you guys have computer or have render farms like that at your company? OK, 24,000 cores? Nice. That's great. OK, awesome. The point is, that's a massive amount of computing power to create these things. And here's some statistics. So for each frame of Brave, this specific scene, I would say, for this scene where she's chasing the wisp, she follows it along, took 72 hours to render each frame. That's on a render farm with 2,000 frames. That's 24 frames a second. When you're rendering a movie, it plays at 24 frames a second, and it's a 90-minute film. That means it's 9.3 million hours of rendering. That would take 1,065 years. That just tells you the scale at which that rendering has to happen. And this is a massive render farm. 2. So the point that I want to make here is this is what it takes to make a movie. Do you guys have time for this? You don't, right? Product design does not have time for this. That's not what you can do. And so what we're really about here is speed. You've got to get speed to market. You've got to get that design through your pipeline. You have to get visualization done. You have to have speed of a lot of different things. You have to have speed of decision-making. You have to have speed of communication. You have to have speed of execution, your speed of go-to-market. All of those things have to move at a rapid pace. And 3D is supposed to accelerate that, and it does, and it can. But when it comes to visualization, true visualization, the whole reason why— one of the reasons why we want to use 3D is to get rid of physical samples. But if you do a 3D sample and it doesn't really look like the physical sample, is it really helping you very much? But to get it to look like that physical sample, it takes way too long. The process is too hard. Maybe you have to get external help to be able to do it. You have to have somebody who knows lighting and texturing and all that stuff to make it look right. And that really slows you down. It allows you not— or it makes you not able to do that. So what we really focus on— real-time means the highest quality possible plus the speed of being able to do it. Now, the highest quality part didn't exist for a long time. That was something that you had to rely on hardcore render engines— V-Ray, KeyShot, all those things like that. For Pixar, it was RenderMan. You had to rely on that. And that has come down, or has come parity now, where real-time rendering can be just as good as regular rendering, or as ray-traced rendering. And they're both ray-traced, but I'll say that. So let me ask a question. How many of your teams are at the very beginning of your 3D journey? It's OK. It's OK if you are. Beginning your 3D journey. How many of you are kind of like midway through? You're kind of, you're starting to use 3D, you're starting to do your designs in 3D and starting to move that. I'd say that's probably the vast majority, right? Kind of in that middle, in that middle group. How many of you feel like you're, oh, we got this done and it's, we can move fast and everything. How many of you guys feel that way? Okay. A few of you. Great. Now that everybody in here is kind of at different stages of their 3D development, and that's OK. The way that we look at it, we want to be able to support as a company every company along that way, and real-time can do that. Real-time rendering can do that. Let me back up for just a second. I always do this because some people don't quite know what that really means, what real-time means. And the way that I explain real-time is if I wanted to change Merida's hair color, I'd go into the 3D software. I'd pick her hair. I'd change the materials, make it all look good. And then I'd send it to the render engine, right? So I'd send it to the render farm, make a turntable, see what that looked like. That is not real-time. A movie is offline. We call it offline, right? I sit there. I watch it. It's done. I don't interact with it. Real-time, it's like I'm playing Fortnite, and I want my character to have blue hair, right? So it's blue— it's orange now. I want to change it to blue. I click a button. It's done. I can interact with that character, move it around. So real-time versus offline, that's what we're talking about. And then ray traced— does everybody know what ray tracing is? If you don't, it's OK. It's OK. What ray tracing is, is in computer graphics, it's that big bright light that's blinding me right now, right? It's bouncing off this. And then it's hitting the ceiling. It's hitting the floor. If it's hitting something that's red, there's going to be red on the floor because it's bouncing that color around. That's what ray tracing is in 3D. And that's a really expensive thing to do. But that ray tracing can now be done in real time, which is awesome. So whether— I back up just because I wanted to make sure we're all on the same page with that. But now we talk about phases of where you're at with 3D. First phase is in that transition to 3D. You're transitioning over to 3D. You're getting your 2D designs into 3D space, maybe looking at what software you want to use, what tools you want to use, how do you utilize this throughout the pipeline, trying to get people trained up in that. And that's totally fine. Phase 2 is you're starting to really utilize 3D. So you've got your designers doing 3D. You've got a PLM setup. You've got rendering going. You've got some things that are really kind of starting to put together. You maybe have teams here and there utilizing 3D. The third one is leveraging 3D. And this is really where the key comes in, is leveraging that 3D technology to really make things move quickly. and no matter what, no matter what part you're in, uh, on along this line, um, there's always, there's always the capability for real-time technology to really make it even faster for you. Um, and so that's what we really do as a company is we look at where your company is at and we say, how does, how does the latest technology make you faster at the point that you're in?

I, I just wanna also say like sometimes companies will skip ahead, which is okay. They leverage vendors like ourselves or, or some other service provider to skip ahead, right? I want to be able to create a VR/AR solution and really leverage 3D and do this with my products. And so they don't necessarily have the pipeline or the process put in place for their organization. They just go skip ahead. And that's OK. You can definitely do that. You can definitely leverage 3D today if you don't necessarily have any 3D, right? Somebody can come in and do that work for you. Really what we're talking about, though, is helping organizations move through this process where you say, hey, today we have 10% of our current garments in 3D models. We want to move to 20%, 50%, 100%. And over that course of time, you can start to utilize and then leverage across the whole pipeline. It's not necessarily about your customer experience. It's also about the whole process moving from, how long it takes you to create one season, how long it takes you to get those decisions made, how long it takes you to actually get the marketing materials to start to advertise that, to get the decisions coming back from your customers as to what styles they like, what colors they like, what textures they want, all of those types of things. So as we look at this, it's not to say that I have to be in one of these sections. I just need to know where I'm at as an organization so that I can, utilize services to provide highly leverageable 3D experiences before my whole organization kind of catches up to that.

Yeah. So once again, with these phases, it doesn't really matter to us which phase you are in. What we want to do is be able to help you leverage the technology where you're at to get you to that next phase that you want. Okay? So if we talk about real-time 3D, and we talk about the process and how real-time 3D affects that process all the way down the line, the first thing is in design. One of the things that we really struggled with— well, I wouldn't say struggled with, but it's always been a struggle. And I tell this example from personal experience just as an example of it. When I was at Nike, I had been working on a 2020 shoe or footwear release. And obviously, this was back in 2014. So it was 6 years in the future. I'd been working on these super cool-looking shoes, been working on those, did all these really cool 3D renders, animations of them, and everything. And it took me— it had taken me about 3 months to do this. And the rendering itself took probably a week and a half to 2 weeks to do that, to do that rendering. And that was even throwing it to the render farm, all that kind of stuff. But when you've got airbags, and you've got transparent materials, and all this kind of stuff, it gets really— lengthy. The meeting with the VPs was the next day. It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And the designer comes to me and says, I gave you the wrong colorway. That's the wrong colorway. And I said— he goes, can you change it? And I said, well, yeah, I can change it in like 2 seconds. But I have to re-render all of that stuff, right? So he's like, well, do whatever you can. So I kick off the renders, throw it at the render farm. I'm up all night watching these renders come in frame by frame by frame by frame. And the meeting's at 8 o'clock in the morning, and it's 7:55, and I still have 20 frames left to render, right? Didn't happen. I call him up. This is not going to happen. And he said, ah, well, I guess we can't show it. So 3 months' worth of work and all of that effort got thrown out the window because we couldn't render it fast enough, right? I couldn't make a decision quick enough, or we couldn't get the right information fast enough. Having something— I would have killed for what I have right now.

Right?

When we're talking about live visualization, if he would have come to me now and said, hey, I need that. I need a different colorway. Oh my gosh, we have to have it for tomorrow. I'd be like, sure. Flip the switch, hit render, 40 seconds later, my renders are done, and I go home for the night. That's what real-time can do. And it's not just about that, but it's about— think about it at scale. Think about it at volume, right? When you've got multiple different colorways, when you've got multiple different SKUs, you want to do turntables, you want to do front, back, left, right, you want to do design reviews, whatever it is, and you have to render that much? You don't have time for that. You really need— and so live reviews and live visualization means a lot. Now let's talk about sampling. A lot of times we talk to companies that do 3D, but they stop because they're like, we can only do rendering for 4 styles because we don't have enough time before we have to get to reviews or we have to get to the next point. And so they go, well, I can only do a front view. Of these 10 SKUs and of these 5 colorways because it just takes too long. In fact, I would ask this. Do any of you guys not even do rendering? You just do screenshots and put them in your tech decks or something like that?

Don't be embarrassed.

Yeah, it's OK. It's OK. But we do that because we're in such a rush, and there's this tool that's supposed to help me, and it doesn't get me there because it takes too much time, right? In fact, we were just talking to a company a brand, and they had this exact problem. They're like, we don't even— we literally do one render and throw it in our PLM. And then if we possibly can at the end of the project, we'll go back and do one more render of it because they just take too long, right? And to us, we're like, gosh, we could— if that's the problem you have, we can solve that like that, really quickly with real-time. So hyperfast rendering means that you don't have to go, well, I can only do 3D for this much, but then I have to do all this sampling for all this other stuff because I just don't have time to render it. okay? That sampling can be done in 3D when you have hyperfast rendering because you can do it at volume, okay? Manufacturing— this is one thing that we're working on right now quite a bit with our software called Stage— is the ability for live collaboration and communication. So with your manufacturing partners, a lot of times there's back and forth there that has to happen where they're sending screenshots, or they're sending renders, or they're sending information to you. And you have to give them feedback and go back and forth, and there's a time delay there. With real-time collaboration, what we're building into Stage is the ability to open up your 3D file in a virtual environment, photoreal, everything straight from whatever your software is, grab a link, send it to whoever you need to. All of a sudden, it becomes a multiplayer video game. Don't think of it like a video game, right? But think of it like a live design review. You're taking notes, you're putting annotations in, you're making changes on the fly, you're talking about it right there all together, seeing it at the same time. Think about at volume what that happens to your design iteration loops with your manufacturers. So that's another thing. Marketing. You do all this 3D work, you build these models, you do all this design stuff, you send it to manufacturing, you have all this stuff in your DAM or your PLM, and now you go, well, now we need to do marketing shots of it. So an outside agency comes in. They build everything from scratch. They do it from there, right? Are they going to leverage that 3D that you spent all that time created? Maybe, maybe not. But now they've got to do all this hardcore rendering and all this setup. And now you have to have lighting and all this kind of stuff. When you have real-time rendering at your fingertips and you have the right tools, this becomes, oh, I need a shot for social media? Let me create that in 20 seconds. 30 seconds. I'll show you that in just a second here. Then sales. So we actually were talking to one of our clients, and they actually were using Stage in their buyers' meetings. So when they would take their assortment to their buyers, they would pull it up inside of Stage or do renders so fast. And they were getting much quicker decision-making because they were able to do that. So fast. So using live real-time visualization as a sales tool is a huge opportunity as well that you haven't been able to do before, but it leverages that 3D all the way from beginning to end. So now that we talk about that, there's a lot of storytelling that happens. Just like Nick said before, part of your job is to tell that story of your product internally to get buy-off from the people that you need that buy-off from. There's that internal storytelling that goes on. But then there's also the external storytelling. The cool thing is, is that real-time visualization can go across that entire process. So it's not just about internal communication or internal decision-making, but now we can use real-time to create interactive experiences. We can do really fast rendering to put on social media, put on our advertisements, put in your marketing materials. Whatever, you can leverage all that 3D, and you can do it very fast to tell stories externally and internally at the same time. This is where you can see this end-to-end 3D pipeline really starts to take shape, because not only am I able to use that 3D in my design process, but I'm now leveraging all of that across the entire pipeline. That's usually a hard thing to do when rendering and creating the visuals takes so long, it takes so much effort, and you have to have specific teams to be able to do it because it's so complicated. My designers don't know how to set up lighting, and they don't know how to set up render settings and all those kinds of things. So this is where real-time really starts to shine.

Steve, for you.

Yeah.

And I think just really helping leaders define what digital transformation really means, 3D digital transformation as an organization. This right here, the last two slides you've seen, are really how we would help our customers define digital transformation for 3D. If you're trying to build out a pipeline, if you're trying to be able to leverage it, it's not just about the design process. It's not just about getting rid of sampling and being able to be more sustainable. It's not just about manufacturing, but it's also about what you can do from a marketing standpoint, a sales standpoint, and how all that time and energy and money gets saved throughout the whole process. At the same quality, if not higher, with a lot more options, a lot more flexibility, a lot more ability, which you kind of see.

Yeah. So I'm going to go pretty quick through these, but I want to give you just some ideas of some use cases. So a lot of times you need to look at colorways. You need to do batch rendering, right? You need to have multiple colorways and do that. This is just a video of— it's sped up just a little bit. Just for time at the beginning here, creating colorways. But creating colorways inside— this is Stage. This is our software for doing live real-time visualization. Stage can bring in any 3D data that's OBJ, FBX, glTF, GLB. We have a really strong connection with Browzwear's vStitcher. We have a plug-in for that that allows you to go back and forth between vStitcher and Stage very quickly. But this is all doing real-time ray tracing. So it's the stuff that used to take hours and hours. Is now being done at 60 times a second. This is what real-time does. So it allows me to see those materials, those PBR materials, lighting, reflection, global illumination, all of those things. I'm setting up the colorways really fast and then switching through— switching between those colorways very rapidly as well. And so you can see how fast this goes. Now when I start rendering— and I'm just going to set up some camera presets really fast too. So I can set up— I can just— position it where I want, save the preset, position it where I want again, save the preset. Now this is all in real time. Like I said, this is sped up like 1.5 times a little bit, but if you want to try this out and you want to see what it feels like and see how fast it is, just come out to our booth and give it a shot. You can try it. The point is, is that with all of this, now I'm saying— now I'm going to set up an animation. So I'm going to set up a turntable. So I set the start, rotate it 360, set the end. I have a turntable that fast. I didn't have to go into a timeline, look at keyframes, get into another software system, whatever. I just do that. And now I go, OK, now I want to make it longer, so I make it 10 seconds. So now that I've got it set— and I'm actually adjusting this quite a few times if you see this. I'm just going, eh, I like it. No. Eh. So now I'm going to batch render this. Now, this is in real time. This is not 1.5 times. I've set up a batch to run. It's going to render to my output folder. I'm setting up all these batch renders. And it's— so it's going to do stills. It's going to do some animations. And you can look inside of here. It tells me what lighting I'm going to use, what scene I'm going to use, what the resolution is going to be, all of those options, right? And then here's my turntable. So it's going to be a 1920 by 1080, 600 frames of animation. Just remember that— 600 frames of animation, okay? Once I get that going, I'm just going to hit render. Now this is rendering local on my machine. Now this is, this is on a machine that uses a an RTX 2080. So it's not like 4090 Ti with everything on that. This is like a 2080. And you can see how fast these renders are going. Now, these are ray traced renders, bounce lighting, everything. This is how fast. If you look at— and you can't see it. If you can see the frames right there, that's how fast it's rendering frames for those. Now, this is great for one shoe. But think about this again at volume. If you have to do that, for hundreds of SKUs with hundreds of colorways and all of that. You don't have time for that. Well, now you do, and you can do it over and over again, and you can say, oh, we'll make that change. This is why I say if he would have come to me at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and said, hey, I gave you the wrong colorway, can you do that? I would have said, yeah. This whole video is like, what is it, 2 and a half minutes something? See, I'm just switching between colorways right here, but this whole video, only takes 3 or 4 minutes or something like that. That's to set up cameras, set up my colorways, set up my rendering, do the rendering, and get it all done. So you can see now, I just switched— I went in and switched the colorway, re-hit Render, and it's going. So I just rendered front, back, left, right, 3/4, and a turntable in high definition of this within like 4 minutes. This is the power of real-time, and this is why we built Stage. This is why we built this software, because we use it ourselves. We do a lot of content in stage ourselves, because we don't have time to use traditional rendering. And this gives us exactly what we want. So you can see how beneficial this is. And just out of time, I'm going to skip to the next one really quick here. So render speed and quality. So there's a difference between RTX. Who knows what RTX is? It's real-time ray tracing. Versus traditional ray tracing, right? Real-time ray tracing does the exact same thing. It bounces the light around, but it makes some approximations. But it's so good that you can barely tell the difference, but it allows you to do it in real time. And so what this video shows right here is just the difference between them. And I'll maybe skip through it a little bit. But this is your real time right here. This is path tracing. You guys have probably seen this in rendering where it resolves. It kind of goes pixely, and then it resolves. right? And that's great. We can do both of them inside of Stage. Regular path tracing is a little bit slower, a little bit more accurate, right? Gives you a little more bounces of light and that kind of stuff. But I'll show you that— but it'll show you the difference here. So this is regular ray tracing. You can see it actually at the bottom there calculating. So now I'm switching between the two, right? If I didn't show you the difference between those two, would you even notice? Most of your customers, most of people looking at things, For the trained eye, you can look at things and be like, oh, that button doesn't have quite enough light right under there. That's probably— that's not as accurate as it should be. But most of your customers, what are they looking at? Yeah, it looks good. OK, keep going, right? Oh, yeah, that looks great. Keep going, right? The point is, is it's not about I have to have it absolutely physically perfect. It's for that decision-making, is it enough information that I can take that decision to the next level? Now sometimes, of course, you want it absolutely perfect. I'm not saying don't ever go there, but what I'm saying when you're— is when you're talking about at scale, a lot of times 99% is exactly what you need. And if you can get there in a quarter of a second versus 5 minutes, that's really all you need to do, right? So it's not that the quality isn't as good, it's that that speed allows you to get there so much faster and get to that point so much faster. Now, this one is multicolorway batch rendering inside of vStitcher. So this is the plugin that we have inside of vStitcher. So I've got different colorways here on Sappho. You guys have probably seen this out in our booth. And just out of time, I might kind of skip through this if you want to see this. But inside of vStitcher, you can actually render with Stage straight from vStitcher. So you can pick all your colorways, pick all your settings, set your defaults of what your render wants to look like. Do I want the avatar? Do I want transparency? How many of the colorways do I want? What resolution? What cameras did I set up inside of Stage? All of that stuff all automated. And then you can go down. I can pick my cameras. I can pick what I want. And then I just hit Render. And it's going to go through and pull all of those colorways out, pull them into Stage, render all those to a folder, and be done. And this is all in real time. So what you're seeing here is how fast it goes. It's exporting to Stage right now. And then it jumps into Stage, opens it up, and you'll start to see it churning through the renders. So as it does this, think about the time savings and the ability to communicate every colorway you have, every SKU you have, every style you have, rather than we've got to pick 5 of them because that's all the time we have to render, right? You can go through all of these and just start churning out these renders very quickly and then communicate those very rapidly too. So there you go. Here's where they start to just— render out. Yeah.

So we have use case after use case after use case to be able to talk through and walk through what Stage can do to help in this whole pipeline. But what we want to do is spend the next number of minutes that we have together, 10, 15 minutes together, just opening it up and hearing from you, your thoughts, questions, things that you might be struggling with, anything that we can do to help answer any of those questions.

So, and even questions about the technology. If you guys have questions about the technology or what it can do, what it can't do, we'd love to hear that.

So we have Michael over here. He's got the easiest job in the world. He sells Stage, so it's pretty easy. He's got a microphone though, if you want to run it to you.

And I think, did you have a QR code too? So if you want to ask anonymously, You can scan the QR code that he's going to put up here and then ask questions.

Hello. I think visualization for a very big brand is not only about the product at the individual level, but also the range, like the collection. So for us, visualization is how we can make decisions like the color balance, like the product choice for the customer. How do you see— is there a use case for this technology to be able to visualize the range as a whole, not only like individual products?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the next version of Stage that we're releasing— because if you're talking about a range of products like line planning or something like that, the next version of Stage that we're releasing, it's actually in final development right now, will have the ability to put in multiple outfits all at the same time. So you can bring in entire lines all together, see them all together, move them around, arrange them, do renders with them, all of that kind of stuff. So when you're talking about— if you have a whole different line of options, you want to see all those at the same time. Is that your question that you're asking? OK, yeah. So Stage will be able to do that in the next version. That's supposed to come out. We're hoping that that comes out in the next couple of weeks.

And on top of that as well, the next iteration of that that's coming just beyond in the roadmap is to be able to put head to toes, right? So it's one thing to have— I have my apparel, I have my garment. I also want to put some footwear on it. —or I want to put a hat or a backpack or something else, right? I want to be able to visualize all my products together for those brands that have that. So you'll be able to do that as well, taking different files from different software or 3D software.

So it doesn't have to be just from V-Stitcher. Like I said, Stage is agnostic to the data, right? It could be OBJ, FBX, GLTF, GLB. We're also developing Datasmith plugins. There's a lot that we can do there.

But for apparel, we definitely lean towards Browzwear. We would love to talk to you about why that is if you want to talk to us offline. But yeah, we're happy to go into that as well. Yeah. Other questions or comments or thoughts?

OK. Do you have a plugin for CLO 3D including rendering garments with avatars, a plugin rendering animation from CLO 3D? We don't have a plugin for CLO. That isn't on the roadmap at this point. We actually have an exclusivity with Browzwear that we're really excited about. But that doesn't mean you can't use it with Cloe. It means that there's just more of you manually export the data from Cloe, bring it into Stage, and you can do all the same stuff. So it's not that it's uncapable of that. It's just that there's no plugin for it to automate that whole process with Cloe. OK, well, we got a bunch of them here. OK, is it also possible to render animations in Stage or only turntables? Right now, the camera animates, and the object can animate, like doing turntables or things like that. But animation, bringing— importing animations like walk cycles and simulated garments and everything is on the roadmap coming very soon. So that will be available very, very soon as well. Yeah.

And I would just say to that, one of the core concepts that we invested in as an organization is that we're taking the technology of the Unreal Engine, all of the capability that exists in the engine, and bringing that into the industry and putting it at the disposal of your fingertips. So the capability is for sure there for all of these things. It's just a matter of us making sure that there's UI that is there that's simple, very easy to use and to leverage because we know that if it's not easy to use, it's not going to be used. There's a reason why you guys haven't all hired your Unreal Engine developer team and gone and done this all yourself. A service that is provided that puts that right at your fingertips. So we will continue to leverage all of that capability as time goes on. That's what our roadmap represents is all of that capability that continues to come, and that will come even more as you have Unreal Engine 6 and 7 and beyond. That will all get faster, better, more capability. And so that's how we leverage that. and that is what our promise is to our clients, is to continue to harvest all of that capability.

Yeah, great question. Do you have a case of instant digital try-on used in a wholesale showroom? We do have one small— if you can switch back real quick. This was a quick POC that we threw together with a client, a big brand, that was kind of cool because we were like, we were really trying to push into this, but it was really cool to actually see, and it's a video. This is all in Unreal. But what it was is they wanted to see how different sizes fit on different poses. So if I have a small and I put my arms up, what does it show, right? If I'm stretching like this, what does it look like with a small or a large? Does it bunch too much? All of that kind of stuff. If you can see her blinking, she's actually blinking in here. So this is live.

I'll just say for this as well, this is a very quick proof of concept for a larger brand. So this is not a finished product that we would ever put on a floor or anything like that, but to be able to show the capability and what can be done for more of that internal storytelling that can happen of like, this is our capability. As we want to clean this up, we can and make it ready to actually be interactive with our customers.

Yeah. So that was just something that was an example. Of that. So you can go back to the questions now. But that was just an example of something that can be done in real time to do virtual fitting or virtual try-on, or even testing different sizes. Let's put a different sized avatar in there and see what it feels like when they're wearing a large or when they're wearing a small or whatever. So, OK. Can products become too perfect? Sometimes defect, imperfectionism brings a product to life. How do you handle this requirement? Very good question. A lot of times what happens in 3D is it looks too good. It doesn't look like a physical product because it looks too good. Sometimes that is even the way that you're rendering it. Rendering has a big deal to do with that. It's not just about an imperfection in the leather or whatever it is. Sometimes it's just the fact that the render is just too crisp. It doesn't look like it came from a camera. And if you want to see on the floor in Stage, we actually have camera controls. That give you like— I know this is a nerd word, I call it a nerd word— but like chromatic aberration, if you know what that is. So it's like lens distortion and things like that on the edges, vignetting of lenses, like bloom, all that stuff. You can do that all in real time in your renders inside of Stage to make it look even better. Imperfections in the— things like imperfections in the 3D models and things like that, you'd want to do in like your textures and your materials. And all of that. But we also feel like I want it to look like it came out of a real camera, not a digital, not a, not a CG, you know, super crisp rendered camera. So that's a great thing. Come, come to our booth, you can see that.

One thing that a lot of our customers are doing is replacing a lot of the photo shoots that have to be done, right? There's a high volume cost of, you know, organizing, conducting photo shoots, all the post editing, all the types. To Barry's point, like Much of that can be replaced utilizing your 3D models that you have and being able to do it inside of Stage so that you can actually have it just like you would a custom photo shoot. But you can change the scene that you want it to be on rapidly like that. You can change the styles. You can change the colorway. You can change the models. You can change the way that the cameras are set up.

Cool. How do you perform a virtual fitting with Stage and CLO 3D? That's something that's probably a much deeper conversation. Whoever asked that, feel free to come to our booth, and we can talk a little bit more about that. But virtual fitting, I mean, that's a great instance where it's like, I want to be able to do a virtual fitting session and see what that is. One of the cool things about Stage is that it's actually live connected to the file. So when you export something and import it into Stage, it's now watching that other file. And so if you want to make a change immediately, you just change it, export it, re-export it. As soon as your export's done, it reloads into stage. So you could literally be in your software package and having it fitted on, you know, whatever it is in stage, be changing the draping, changing the pattern, changing whatever it is, and as soon as you finish that simulation— that's one beautiful thing inside of Browzwear, the plugin that we have— is as soon as that simulation is done, shoots it right back over to stage. So that's super exciting. Use of that. Why this partnership with Browzwear and VStitcher? I can answer that.

Okay, go for it. The most simple— we can definitely dive further into this, it's a longer conversation, but the best way we can put it is the vision that Browzwear and their organization have for what is needed in order to really have an end-to-end solution for their clients is exactly right. Meaning it can't just be a world in which you only utilize one software solution to to be able to do that. It has to be an ecosystem that enables what you're trying to do, especially because it's not necessarily always just about the apparel. Sometimes it's about the footwear, it's about the— Accessories or whatever. Accessories, it's about everything else, and as an organization, you can't just be in a closed-looped environment that is requiring you to stay in their space. You have to be able to utilize the best of what all of these different softwares can provide in order to have that end-to-end solution. So for apparel, we know that Browzwear does that and does that very well. And we'd love to talk to you more about that.

Yeah. What is your stance on better standards to improve the use of 3D fashion? I think we're headed in a really good direction. For a long time, you see exports from software. It's kind of to Nick's point that for a long time, the idea was, stay in my software, use my software, use this thing. And as we see the 3D ecosystem get bigger and better, what we're seeing is those standards starting to be adopted by everybody so that whether it's coming from Blender or vStitcher or Clo or whatever, they can be utilized across the pipeline in a much better way. glTF and GLB are a great example of that. Now, even amongst different softwares, how they implement those can be— a little bit different. But the idea is that we're starting to see file formats and the way that we do materials. I mean, PBR textures is a big deal, right? Are you using real true PBR textures, or are you kind of messing with it in your own software? And so if somebody tries to get that out, they don't get your material, right? We see that a lot, that there's specific things inside of packages that this is only for my package, and you can do it really cool in my renderer, but you can't do it anywhere else. Things like that really kind of close it off. And so better standards means more open standards where more, there's more adoption across the whole pipeline. So that's a, that's a big topic. We could spend hours and hours on that. So that's a really good question. Then the last one, do you have any cases that show where your solution helps with sample reduction? Well, I can say this, one of our clients, traditionally they were going, they were building a lookbook and this is usually, because they would normally need to do samples to take photography to put in their lookbook to send out to their buyers, right? They were using Stage to do their lookbook. And normally, they would do about 20 pages of rendering. And it would take them 6 weeks to do all that and get all that together. In this lookbook in particular, they did 68 pages— 68 pages of renderings. And they did it in a couple of days. They did it so fast that they could do massively more rendering and a lot more. And so they didn't have to go order all those styles. They didn't have to go order all those samples. They could do it in 3D, and they could get it through that whole process. And they weren't limited by the amount of time that they had. We've got to get this out, but we can only render 4 outfits. So we're going to do renders here and then order samples for the rest of them. That was a really good example to me of them reducing the samples. In what they were doing.

We know that this is an emerging space. We know that there's a lot to talk about in this. We actually don't have anybody else coming into this room, so we can definitely stay. We are happy to take, you know, individual questions, but our time is out. So we do want, you know, to be cognizant of that, let everybody kind of take off. But really grateful for everybody that showed up today, all the opportunity that we had to share with you all the questions and feedback that we received. But we'll be here for the remainder of as long as it takes. So please come see us, or if you want to come over to our booth later on this afternoon, we'll be there as well.

So thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.