AI and/or 3D?
For the past few years, many companies have embarked on a journey to transition from using traditional 2D sketches to realistic 3D models.
How can your investment in 3D align with the latest innovations in artificial intelligence? It depends!
To come up with a concise strategy, you will need to understand the capabilities of both and balance them with the underlying business objectives you are trying to meet.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but the following are just a few reasons why you might be moving towards 3D from 2D. By breaking the requirements down to a smaller level, we can then see if or how AI can complement 3D.
View Photo Realistic Rendering w/o Physical Sample
Realistic renderings of a product can help teams identify design changes required and/or to not move forward with the design. Generative AI can help not only reduce the time to generate renderings from days to seconds, but it can also create multiple options in that same time frame.
Early Costing
If you are leveraging standard material libraries with a CAD tool, you can quickly generate pre-costing for those included materials (will still have to manually estimate for non-3D materials such as packaging).
By leveraging AI, we can look at this in a different perspective and instead easily analyze historical data for similar products to establish target costs and margins. AI could also be leveraged to propose the materials to use in the design to meet consumer features and benefits.
Situational Backgrounds
A 3D asset can be extremely valuable to be able to take a product and place it into various situations such as a digital show room that represents your store or your customer’s stores. It’s incredibly powerful to see how a product looks folded on a table or hanging from a garment rack in concert (or in contrast) with other products.
AI still has a way to go for concepts like digital show rooms but the ability to see one or more products in various situations and/or poses can help teams make better design and color decisions earlier in the process.
On-Model / Head to Toe Outfits
Styles are not created in isolation and are typically intended to be paired with others. 3D assets can be combined but most tools require some level of manual intervention to do this.
AI tools allow you to create a fully dressed scenario in a few seconds and/or combine several different products onto a predefined template. AI can also quickly generate renderings for inclusive sizes of a given product without additional design or development work.
Closing Thoughts
There are a lot of other goals and initiatives that both AI and 3D support. The purpose of this paper was not to delve into every possibility but to help illustrate a few examples of how both tools could support these initiatives separately or together.
AI and 3D are complementary and combining them will create significant value for your business. The maximum benefit will be achieved if you have a clear vision on of how they will work together to meet your specific requirements.
