Digital Fabric Interoperability Project (D-FIP)

3D Physics Conversion Tool

The growth of 3D digital product creation tools for the apparel industry represents our belated but passionate effort to update our industrial-era methodologies for the digital age. By transitioning physical product development work into a 3D format, we can achieve countless benefits that range from process optimization to reduction of lead times. Beyond these business benefits, we see 3D technology as the engine of a profound shift toward a more sustainable apparel industry. When we work digitally we can reduce waste in the development process, design and sell garments virtually before producing excess inventory, and even begin to dress the virtual world without creating any physical versions at all.

In order to kick start this engine, we need help from the open source community to build connectivity between the major 3D design solutions on the market. Major apparel brands and their suppliers will struggle to systematically adopt 3D technology so long as it is cost and time prohibitive to recreate raw material assets multiple times, for multiple clients, and their disparate digital toolsets. By allowing fabric drape data, aka physics, to flow to any 3D design software, the necessary building blocks for a sustainable and digital apparel industry can be leveraged to their greatest possible extent. We invite you to join representatives from Target, Gap, Unifi3d, Perry Ellis, Hugo Boss, Under Armor, Kalypso, and Ralph Lauren to help us achieve this future for our industry.

Why are 3D Physics Important?

The design and development of clothing and fashion has always been based on tactile, physical materials and their response to gravity when placed on the human body. Designing how fabric is cut, sewn and arranged around the body digitally has up until very recently not been possible, in contrast to other creative fields like architecture and automotive design. The unlock of this technology has been the development of 3D physics data, which accurately translates the tangible properties of fabric performance into 3D compatible data. Simple measurements like weight and thickness as well as complex calculations of stretch, bend, sheer and more combine to power a revolutionary phenomenon for fashion design. For the first time ever a fashion illustration (when done in 3D) can represent what the physical product will look like so accurately that the illustration could be used in place of physical photography. The accuracy that good fabric physics underpins has powerful implications for everyone across the fashion industry.