A Follow Up: Facts For 3D Rendering in Fashion

Last week, Yury Antonov wrote a spot on post about the current state of 3D rendering in the fashion space.? He brought up so many great points that we have been talking about at Trapdoor Creative, Inc. for years.? In fact in the past 5 years, we have been focused on those problems, and how to create cutting-edge solutions for them.? None of those issues need to be issues anymore.? The solution lies in leaving behind old technologies, and leaning into what new, advanced technologies can do - specifically, real-time rendering.?

This is why we built Stage .

I wanted to address each of his points one by one and mention how Stage solves this.

1 - Most common use cases: internal reviews & digital wholesale

Absolutely agree!? Too often, companies are wanting the 3D pipeline to not only be able to create quick imagery, but they want that same data to produce final quality marketing shots as well.? Most imagery doesn't need to be stitch-perfect in 8K glory. It needs to be just enough to satisfy internal reviews and communication with wholesalers. Finding a balance between volume, speed, and quality is really what is needed.? Stage is meant to balance all of these, giving you insanely fast rendering (which means you can do more), at the quality that is most needed.? It really excels at this.

2 - Rendered images are still predominantly viewed on laptop screens

Agreed! All too often customers ask us to render in 8K or 4K when they really don’t need it.? You trade speed for size, and most people won’t see any difference between 1080p (HD) or 8K (mostly because of the screen they are looking at).? Why waste the render time and cost on size, if it doesn’t matter in the end? ?With Stage, you can keep your render size where you need it (around 2K) and get rendering speeds that allow you to iterate in real-time, and not waste time rendering larger.? If you want to, Stage can render in 4K at speeds of ~5 seconds per image.? Sometimes less.

3 - 2k resolution is more than enough for the majority of usecases. Agreed!? Same as #3.? Don’t waste time and cost on pixels that don’t help.? Stage can render your 2K images in fractions of a second, and looks amazing

4 - CLO 3D specific fact: Noise Threshold should stay between 0.03 and 0.05. fits 95% of the cases. Agreed!? Whether this is in CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. or Browzwear , or any other renderer, noise should be kept to a minimum, but shouldn’t have to be 0.? Again, it’s speed vs. need.? With Stage, noise is non-existent (with RTX rendering), and minimal with traditional path-tracing, all while doing it dramatically faster than traditional rendering pipelines.

5 - Never pay per image rendered!

With Stage, you get unlimited rendering.? No per-render costs, no render credits, ever.

6 - No image should render longer than 5 minutes! (2-2.5 should be an average).

Try rendering in fractions of a second.? This is the exact reason we built Stage.? We were sick of waiting for even the fastest renders.? Stage will render a 2K image in .5 seconds, and a 4K image in 5-10 seconds.? We live in a real-time 3D world now.? You should not have to wait for rendering.? Period.

7 - VRay covers 99.9% of the qualities and usecases at the most reasonable price and easiest implementation (Clo / BW have it built-in

Maybe so.? But speed means that you can’t do as much as you want, and built-in tools are limiting and clumsy to use.? Stage addresses each of these.? It’s insanely fast, and super simple to use, and plugs directly into both Browzwear and CLO.

8 - UE5 is a wild path for still renders, which will drain your budget, delay the project and you will still end up using multiple rendering engines.

Agreed!? UE5 is hard… if you are trying to use the editor.? Stage is built on UE5, takes all of the learning curve away with simple tools and UI, and will allow you to render at ludicrous speeds for stills and animations, save your budget (time is money), and accelerate your project rather than delay it.? If you want to use UE5, and you want simplicity, speed, and ease of use, Stage is built for you.

9 - You can run big scale render farms on your own infra as a brand. The tech is accessible and knowledge is there.

How about NOT creating, paying for, or maintaining a render farm, and setting one local machine up with Stage to do all of your rendering for you?? Save all of the setup time and cost, and render everything in-house at insane speeds.? This is what Stage can do for you (and just wait for Stage Renderbot! (coming soon!!))

10 - Designers should not render or think of rendering settings. It's possible to standardize and automate pretty much everything at this point.

Agreed!? Stage has standardized setups that can be created simply by a single designer or user, then promoted to the entire enterprise to take the guesswork out of lighting, camera setup, render settings, animations, batch rendering, and more.? Stage is all about automation and presets!

11 - Miro is still the easiest and cheapest platform to integrate your render farm with for collection reviews. There are other tools but they require bigger budgets and longer projects.

Miro is great.? Use it ??.? Stage may potentially integrate with Miro in the future ??

12 - Rendering for ecom is a different usecase than rendering for internal/wholesale! Approach these as two different projects still. We built Stage to address all of the internal/wholesale needs, but you can push it if you want for ecomm if you want!

13 - Medium scale rendering operation starts when you are going beyond 10k images per month. Stage will allow you to easily surpass 10K renders/month on a single machine.? Scaling that is easy.

14 - Rendering formats and results: - OBJ = sad - FBX = possible and might be good enough for some products. - GLB / GLTF = good if you know what you are doing. Sad - if not. - USD = you have to know what you are doing! - ZPRJ = only in CLO, but best consistency - BW = only in Browzwear, but best consistency - BLEND = how did you get here? One off the above applies. Fur and displacement would like to have a talk with you privately:)

Stage natively accepts OBJ, FBX, GLB/GLTF at the highest quality.? Our plugins for CLO and BW use GLTF exporting and are tuned to give you the best results possible from the format.? That also allows you to use the export anywhere else you want that accepts GLB.? But remember, garbage in = garbage out!? Your renderer can’t make bad designs or poorly constructed textures look good.

15 - Target minimum acceptable quality, not maximum you can push for. Don't come to the stakeholders with a pen and an empty wishlist - work with them! Sit in their reviews, explore in detail what is just enough for them to use 2D for decision making. Don't promise more. Make sure you make the least do the best!

Agreed! With Stage, you don’t have to balance quality with speed. Stage allows you to get amazing quality instantly.? This allows you to iterate with your customer, exploring options and making decisions in real time, rather than the slow cycle of note, adjust, wait for render.? Review your designs in real time without even rendering if desired.? Quality doesn’t mean slow.

16 - Rendering can be cheap or at least a have a reasonable budget. It needs to be saving you money somewhere else. Plan for it! Don't just add rendering as a new, parallel expense.

How about having a rendering platform that not only allows for immediate, interactive feedback for reviews and design iteration, but also has no render limit, no per-render cost, and works directly in your current pipeline.? This is Stage.n

?It may seem impossible, but we built Stage to do nearly everything that is needed to alleviate the issues that Yury Antonov describes here.? I want to personally thank him for bringing all of these issues up. It helps the 3D fashion industry to really understand process so much more!

If you would like to know more about Stage, please reach out to me here in a DM or on the Stage page.? We would love to understand your brand’s issues, and show you how Stage can solve many of your rendering and visualization issues.

#stageit #stage3d #rendering

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