Violence is raging in the Middle East, with Hezbollah rockets firing into Israel form Lebanon and Israeli bombs falling on the suburbs of Beirut. But not all from that area is bombs, rockets, and bloodshed. OptiTex, an Israeli-based 3D CAD/CAM modeling company, does not work for the military-industrial complex. Rather, the Israeli company works within the very different world of fashion.
Clothing design is a costly process. In between the initial stage of artist’s inception and the final stage of mass production and resale, fashion designers go through a lot of trial and error, of making and remaking clothes to fit on mannequins and models. Certain fabrics don’t move well with certain body shapes, or cool designs could be distorted when shirts are stretched out when they’re worn. These complications are hard to imagine when you’re working in the 2D world of pen and paper.
However, fabrics have three-dimensional physical properties that can be emulated by the power of the computer. How a shirt will drape over your arm or how a suit jacket will sway as you walk are simply functions of a mathematical equation that takes into account variables such as material strength, stiffness, weight.
Looking suave! A 3D model strikes a pose in his virtually designed suit.
OptiTex has simply incorporated those mathematical formulas to create a virtual runway with their 3D Runway Designer. Now, clothing designers can make their prototypes on the computer, try it on a 3D model, and see how it looks strutting down the runway—saving them the time and agony of making and designing an outfit, only to find that their conception doesn’t work in reality.
3D Runway Designer is not only a design tool, but also a communications tool. Even if a designer thinks that they have a brilliant outfit, they still have to convince management and retailers that it looks good. In the old days, either those constituents would simply trust the clothing designer, or they would require a physical design to be made and shown to them on a mannequin or a model to be convinced. If they wanted small changes, the outfit would be sent back for reworking, which could at times be a lengthy (and annoying) process.
Now, with the capability of designing the outfit in the virtual world, the designer doesn’t have to create a real prototype (at least initially) before sending it to higher-level decision makers. Instead, they can just shoot them an e-mail with a video attachment, showing exactly how the outfit will look on a virtual model. This increase in communications capabilities will definitely save clothing designers a lot of time and agony.
The tool is simple in its use yet complex in its . It comes with a whole range of presets for fabrics, which makes life easier for the vast majority of clothing designers who work with specific fabrics. But, if required, they can choose from a myriad of different material attributes, including weight and stiffness, so their 3D models are truly accurate representations of reality. The same is true for their 3D mannequins—there are 40 easy to use preset body types and positions, but they are also fully customizable so that the user can design clothes for all body shapes.
Because of its ease of use combined with complexity, it is already being used by clothing designers like Guess Jeans and Land’s End, as well as leading designer schools, like New York’s Cornell Parson’s School.
Interestingly, OptiTex hopes to move the 3D Runway Designer technology into the mainstream 3D animation realm. They figure that cloth is an important—and time consuming—feature of almost all 3D character animation. Of course, they will face fierce competition from the already-integrated cloth tools in leading modeling programs like Maya, but if OptiTex’s tool is really all that much better and easier to use, all the more power to them!
July 17, 2006 by Jacob Heller
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