How Deckers leveraged InstaLOD to take the company one step closer to achieving their vision of a streamlined 3D-centric production: from design to e-commerce, with the same data throughout the process.
Deckers Brands' fashion and performance lifestyle footwear has earned a global reputation for unparalleled style, quality and comfort. Their portfolio includes brands such as UGG, Hoka One One, Teva and Sanuk. The company's products are sold in more than 50 countries and territories and while their commercial footprint has increased over the years, the increasing need for 3D data as well as the ever-growing spectrum of media channels presented a challenge to their strategic goals and growth.
Over the past three years, Deckers has taken the first steps into modernizing their commercial presence; however, the shift is not an easy one. In order to streamline and shorten their design and development process, the company turned to CAD modeling. Relying on 3D driven processes enables Deckers to cut down both the time and cost it takes to produce a high-quality footwear product.
Enabling enterprise companies to implement a sustainable 3D strategy throughout their organization while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ The search began.
One of the challenges when it comes to CAD-based workflows is the large number of polygons involved, making it a painful process to use resulting assets downstream for e-commerce applications or VR/XR experiences. This is due to the need to have low-polygon assets for both data delivery and realtime visualizations. Coupling the requirement for high visual fidelity of their assets and a desire to target a wide-spectrum of devices resulted in the need for a solution that can automatically process large amounts of data all while maximizing visual quality.
¶ A magical solution was found.
As part of their internal R&D process the team at Deckers evaluated InstaLOD. Immediately, the team was delighted by InstaLOD’s ability to quickly produce beautiful tessellations — but it didn’t end there. Once the digital shoe was refined to a workable mesh, the team started to experiment with InstaLOD's ground- breaking remeshing technology. At the push of a button, a complete retopology could be achieved with stunning results. To top it off, a large number of materials were automatically reduced to a single material. The team was instantly sold on the process to generate a high-quality e- commerce ready asset in just a few minutes.
With their new pipeline in place, Deckers can quickly adapt any of their product's CAD data to every platform. All in all, this saved a minimum of half a day per model of processing time.
¶ Achieving seamless scalability.
Switching costs are always a risk when it comes to on-boarding to new solutions or technology. However, due to InstaLOD's excellent UI and UX, Deckers was able to understand and leverage the software within just one hour of training. The team at Deckers was able to make use of all the SDK has to offer within a short period of time, vitalizing their product process from: raw data to final e-commerce asset.
InstaLOD's high quality algorithms as well as their automatic batch processing technology was essential in enabling Deckers to create VR and AR experiences that include not just one, but entire collections of footwear and apparel in a single scene.
"... our prayers were quickly answered when we heard about the magic of InstaLOD. We can now entirely avoid that bottleneck and freely utilize our CAD assets for any output downstream." - Mitch Harvey, 3D Innovation Manager, Deckers Brands
First published: 28th Jun 2019