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The problem:

I have a product that comes in numerous finishes. I need to be able to show the product in each finish.

The traditional solution:

I have the product made in every finish and get each item photographed.

The new solution:

I have the product meshed. I can then have the product rendered in every finish.

This “new solution” has many advantages:

Next year I have new finishes for my product. The item is already meshed so I can quickly and cheaply get new rendered images of my product.

My costs go down:

once I have the product meshed the cost of draping each finish onto it is very cheap. So cheap I can have my product rendered in new finishes just to see what it would look like.

What do the terms mean:

Rendered:

If I have a digital picture of a sofa and I place a fabric onto it so that the sofa looks like it has been actually made with that fabric I would say the sofa has been rendered with a fabric.

Digital Draping:

It’s the same as “Rendered” I have a digital photo say of a sofa and I drape a fabric onto that sofa so that the sofa looks like it’s been actually made with the fabric.

Meshed:

I have an image of a sofa, I place a mesh over the sofa, this mesh is going to tell the fabric how to lie over the chair.

Summing up:

How to show your product whether a dress, shirt, jacket, chair, curtain, sock, tie, bath, sink or anything you can imagine in all it’s various finishes has for a long time been a problem. It’s very expensive to have a product made in every finish available and then have each item photographed.

Say you had five shirt designs and a selection of 50 fabrics that each shirt could be made up in. That’s a lot of shirts to have made and photographed. This is where digital draping comes to the help. With just one picture of the product (in this case a shirt) we could digitally mesh and then drape all those fabrics onto the shirt. You would then receive 50 images of the shirt in all your finishes.

Are there other ways of doing this?

The simple answer is yes. We are giving you actual images of your product to use. You could use these images online or offline to show your clients or customers. Some companies render (or digitally drape) your product on the fly. What this means is that the rendering is happening on their server and then showing you an image of you product with the new finish. This way is a good solution to the problem, the down side is that it’s very expensive. Companies like North Face do their draping this way and it works great. Not everybody has a company as big as North Face and has not got the thousands of dollars to spend every year (it’s normally an ongoing cost). Both techniques produce the same quality image. Below are some things to remember so that you can make the correct choice.

Option 1:

Manually photograph every item in every finish
1. Expensive (inventory)

Option 2:

Our way (giving you images)
1. Cheaper – a low cost for each new item/fabric to be draped
2. Same quality
3. No ongoing costs
4. Allows you to experiment with new finishes without the expense of having the product made.
5. Quick online

Option 3:

Draping “on the fly”
1. Faster online
2. Expensive (can be over $10,000 per year)
3. Same quality