Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to create a scalable workflow from AutoCAD, Maya, and 3ds Max to Unreal Engine, Unity, and/or 3D and AR web viewers.
- Discover the benefits of using 3D from Autodesk software for B2B sales.
- Discover the benefits and best practices of using 3D from Autodesk programs for consumer-facing experiences.
- Explore how organizations should be thinking about their 3D strategies.
Speaker
- ACAshley CrowderAshley Crowder is a pioneer in 3D and metaverse/web3/spatial computing technology, a trusted and influential business executive, and speaker with expertise in launching scalable 3D and mixed reality platforms with companies like Meta, Merrell, Hugo Boss, and VF Corp. As the CEO & Co-founder of VNTANA, Ashley leverages her engineering background, and leads the overall direction and technology development to shape the future of commerce by making it easy to create a 3D version of every product in the world. Crowder has 14 patents on 3D graphics and hologram technology and is a member of the Khronos Group to help create standards in 3D technology. She was named one of USC's leading Engineering CEOs, won the Patrick Soon Innovation Award and AIS Lumiere Award. She has been featured in Meta's "What is the Metaverse” course on Coursera, Vogue Business, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and Retail Touchpoints. Ashley is passionate about educating brands and creators on the core values of web 3, and invests her time in moving the metaverse and web3 industry forward.
ASHLEY CROWDER: Hi. I'm Ashley Crowder, the co-founder and CEO of VNTANA. I'm here today to talk about how you can scale 3D designs from your design and engineering, all the way through to training materials, e-commerce, B2B sales, and more with game engines. I personally have 15 years experience in industrial engineering and was really frustrated with the inability to easily share and manage and reuse 3D designs for manufacturing.
So really excited to jump in today here at Autodesk University to show you how you can set up these scalable workflows across your organization. We do have the safe harbor statement. So you can read through this. We will be talking about what things are looking like today and where we're going in the future.
So I'll jump right in. The internet is now spatial. We are witnessing this paradigm shift of flat to 3D and volumetric content. And everyone is expecting it, from buyers to consumers, because we can now have interactive content like never before.
Every major online platform has enabled 3D, from Apple's new headset, Microsoft HoloLens, even to Google, Amazon, and Facebook. So many people don't even realize that they're using augmented reality every day, and they're doing a million different funny face videos on Instagram and TikTok. And that's when I feel like technology has really made it, when millions of people are using it daily and they don't even really know that it is AR.
So to ignore the implications of this 3D and AR tech is really akin to ignoring the implications of online shopping. I love this quote from IBM's Institute of Business Knowledge, and it's so true. When dot com first came out and you didn't have a website, it was fine. But 5 to 10 years later, those stores were gone because they didn't keep up. Well, that's how we are today. Most of your websites and digital content are flat. But in the next 5 to 10 years, if you don't progress, if you don't utilize 3D, your competitors will be winning.
And that's because customers now expect a spatial buying experience, whether that's that B2B sale to actually interact and see that medical device or how that piece of factory equipment fits within the factory and really explain that complex piece of equipment or that consumer-facing experience, being able to really see that shoe and how it would fit on your foot. But besides the sales piece, we're actually seeing that innovators who take 3D all the way across their organization are seeing huge ROI, from increasing speed to market, reducing carbon footprint, and reducing costs, not to mention providing better training materials for their staff and just better manuals for customers at the end of the day.
So the way you create and distribute content has fundamentally changed. We've seen a lot of times that companies have invested in siloed applications that just the engineering team use or just the marketing team is off hiring a vendor to create some one-off interactive experience. The way to do this properly is to make sure you-- entire organization can access and utilize your 3D assets in all the different form functions that they need to allow inter-firm collaboration, scale, and control.
And it really is possible, and it's to enable this future of commerce powered by 3D and spatial computing so you can reduce costs, reduce carbon footprint, and increase sales for your organization. So now we're going to take a step through, and I'm going to go through a variety of case studies that show why your entire organization really needs access to 3D models.
So of course, it starts with the engineering team. Many of you out there are using 3D and digital twins to create simulations for predictive learning. Game engines can be used to build complex simulations that run thousands of possibilities that would never be possible to mimic in real life. So you can actually learn and predict maintenance. You can build out better supply chain organizations. You can do better urban planning and infrastructure management and create amazing health care and medical research. And now with the advent of AI, you can do even more in quantum computing at another level that we never thought possible.
We've also worked with companies like MESH01 to do virtual product testing, and it's incredible. Compared to physical, the digital testing allows us to test thousands of more options, way faster, with way more testers that is not limited by geographic area. So the clients have been able to produce better products at the end of the day and save time before investing in expensive tooling and molds before making that shoe or other product.
Merrell is another client of ours who has seen a huge savings-- about 81% per shoe is the estimate-- and about one month faster to market using 3D from design, all the way through to the sell-in period within B2B sales to retailers and to consumers.
And so they take their Rhino CAD file, drop it into Swatchbook, which allows them to color up that with real-time materials from their vendors, know exactly how much it costs and what that carbon footprint is. They're uploading it to VNTANA, where it gets automatically optimized and converted to all the file formats they need for web and augmented reality and game engines. And making sure it's light enough for web is super important if you're going to take anything from manufacturing and use it elsewhere.
Once there, they embedded it in their website to actually get early feedback from customers before it was even manufactured and then also dropped it into a Unity game engine and built a beautiful virtual store, where they could walk buyers through, reducing the need for samples, which significantly reduced costs and reduced carbon footprint. Plus, their buyers loved it, and they didn't have to do as many in-person meetings and trips.
Now, apart from sales, we also see that 3D and interactive experiences can provide better educational experiences. So you could actually walk a client through exactly how a product works or provide this in lieu of a training manual, which no one reads anyways. And so they're experimenting as you go. But this is a much more user friendly, easy, quicker to understand experience.
We've also seen interactive 3D experiences shorten sales cycles, particularly for complex products like medical devices and manufacturing. Where you might get one or two conferences a year to physically see that product in real life, instead you can use virtual reality and augmented reality to place that buyer within that product in real time and highlight those key technical elements to all stakeholders in an easy to understand way. So you're saving on travel costs. You're showing the superiority of your product to the competition. And with these complex products, everyone knows that salesperson really needs to understand the complexities, and having an interactive and 3D training experience has shown much better results with knowledge and retention.
Another client refinery did a survey with all their clients after A/B testing 3D and 2D content, and they found that almost 90% enjoyed the 3D experience. And more importantly, over 70% said it did influence them to make that purchase. So this is moving the needle and the bottom line at the end of the day.
Google has also started testing 3D in search. So if you search for Puma shoes and you're in North America, you will start to see 3D and AR. But this isn't just for consumer-facing companies. If you're a B2B company, search engine optimization is also important. You also want to appear at the top and get people coming to your website. And so far, 3D search is showing a 6% higher click-through rate compared to 2D images alone.
And Amazon is also seeing similar great results with 3D view in your room and augmented reality try-on, which has shown a 2x improvement in purchase conversions over the past year and, overall, 9% improvement in sales. So this is a lot of stats, a lot of use cases across the spectrum, from engineering, to sales, to consumer, and marketing. But wanted to drive the point home of 3D is really lifting the bottom line, and it's doing it across your entire organization.
So now let's jump in and walk through how you actually do this. How can you build some scalable 3D workflows in practice? And we're going to do this starting with 3ds Max example and then a Maya example as well. So for 3ds Max, we have this piece of furniture. And I'm actually going to have our senior technical artist, Tyler, walk through his steps here.
TYLER: Hey, guys. It's Tyler, Senior Technical Artist at VNTANA. And today we're going to be going over exporting our assets out of 3ds Max, optimizing with VNTANA, and then importing into Unreal using the VNTANA plugin. All right, let's go.
So to start with, we need to make sure that we have the Babylon plugin installed to our version of Max. Now, to do this, I'd like to head on over to the vntana.com, head on over to our Resources Center. Under Export Directions, click on 3ds Max. And you should see this link to the Babylon.js exporter page.
Now, if we check that out, this takes us to the GitHub page where we can download all the latest releases of their plugin. So if you just download the installer, unzip it, and run through the installer, it will install the Babylon plugin to your version of Max. After you've installed it, we can open up Max, and you should see this Babylon tab right here.
All right, so diving in. One thing we'll note is our scene looks pretty boring right now. It's gray. That's because we're using a kind of advanced material in Arnold. So if we enable active shade and move around our viewport, you'll see that we have our lovely textured furniture asset here.
So to come check out the materials, let's open up the material graph. I'm just going to expand it real quick. And so these are the materials in our scene. So you can see that we have this awesome material. We're starting from a base color, doing some color corrections, and then feeding it back into the base color. And this is great for rendering. But when it comes out to exporting, we'll need to bake this node graph down.
Moving on, again, these are Arnold standard surface materials. So we have a roughness texture plugged into our specular roughness slot, our metallic texture plugged into our metalness slot, and we have our normal map plugged into our normal. One nice thing about the Babylon plugin is that it adds this section to all of our Arnold standard materials and our surface materials. So we can go ahead and edit those export settings in the Material Editor, so things like transparency modes and if we need to enable backface culling or not. Now, this is really useful for transparent assets, which we're not going to be dealing with today. So we'll just leave those as is.
Moving on to the second material, it's pretty easy. We won't have to touch this guy. We have a texture for our base color, a texture for our roughness, a texture for our metallic, and then a texture for our normal map.
So now that we've taken a look at our materials, I think we just need to bake out this material graph, and we should be good to go. So I'm going to close out of our Material Editor real quick. And I'm going to select the component that we need to bake, which is this cube. And I'm going to head to Rendering and then Bake to Texture.
Now, this is where I can define the channels that I need to bake out. We have access to a whole lot of things. But for what we're going to be doing, we're just going to be baking out the color. So I'm going to have color selected. I'm going to click Add Maps to Selected Objects.
Now, this is going to add the bake setting for our color map. One thing we have to do is, because the rest of our textures are 4K, we're just going to bump this guy up to 4K as well. And then we have a location set already. If you don't, please define that before you bake. And now that everything's set, we're going to bake, and I'll be back with y'all as soon as this is done.
All right, welcome back. We have just baked out our texture using the Bake to Texture window. And we can come check out our bake texture by clicking on the output path. And this is going to open up the folder that we baked our texture to. And if we double-click it, we can check out our awesome texture. So this is looking really good. The only thing that we need to do now is apply this to our material in Max. So let's do that.
I'm going to close out of this. I'm going to jump back over to Max. I'm going to close out our Bake to Texture window, and I'm going to open up our Material Editor. And I'm going to open up the folder that we baked our texture to, and I'm just going to drag it into our Material Editor.
Now, if I take that texture and plug it in directly to our base color slot, we should be good to go. So if I close out of my Material Editor, you'll see that we have our beautifully textured asset looking really good in our viewport. So that means we're ready to export. So I'm going to marquee select everything, go to Babylon, Babylon File Exporter, and then we want to change the output format to GLB. And then we're going to want to define an export path. By default, these settings are pretty good. The only deviance I have is I've disabled the Save 3ds Max File, and I've disabled Export Animations since we don't have any animations.
ASHLEY CROWDER: Awesome. So once you hit Export, we can then upload that to, in this case, our 3D DAM with our 3D viewer. So I'm going to pop over. So yeah-- so I can now easily see this lightweight 3D asset in the viewer. Most viewers, you can adjust the lighting, the background color, get the look and feel that you want for sharing. And I could even leave some comments for Tyler and say, in this case, this looks great, or I might want to ask him to make some edits and changes and tag him.
I could also add some hotspots, maybe explaining where this wood came from or other features about that product. So in this case, let's say it's reclaimed wood so that the manufacturer knows exactly what they need. I can now easily share this with anybody, pop it over, and we automatically also created the USDZ file. So augmented reality is going to work on iOS and Android.
So now I can see this beautiful wood stool in my space, and those of you at home can test out the QR code, as well, if you'd like. And I still can pop and see those recommendations there.
So now we're going to have Tyler walk us through how to use the VNTANA plugin to pull an asset in directly from the DAM and run that into some simulations and create a cool Unreal scene.
TYLER: [INAUDIBLE]-- and if we click that, it's going to prompt us to log in with our platform credentials. So we can just log in. After we log in, this is the page that you'll be greeted with. It may look a little differently than mine. The main dropdown that you want to care about is this folder dropdown. This will allow you to navigate your organization on platforms.
So we're just going to come down to the folder that we have our assets in. And you can see, we have our asset here. And we have some optimization statistics here. We're able to reduce the file size from 61 megabytes down to 1 megabyte, which is awesome. So I'm going to click on Download GLB, and this is going to download a GLB directly to our content folder of our Unreal project.
And as soon as it detects it, it's going to ask us if we would like to import it. So we're going to click Import. The default settings are perfect, so I'm going to click Import. And before we check it out in our Content Browser, there's one more section of the plugin that I'd like to check out.
Under the Tools tab, we have a GLB Normal Correction. Typically, Unreal doesn't process the normal maps correctly for the GLB imports. So we just need to-- we have a script that handles some things. So after you click on the first tab, it will scan your project looking for assets to fix. It's detected that we have an asset that we can process. So we're going to click Process.
And now that the asset is processed, I can close out of the plugin. We can check it out in the Content Browser. So Windows, Content Browser, and I'm going to go to VNTANA, and then we see our asset right here. I'm going to drag it into our scene. And now our asset is ready to be used in our Unreal scene.
ASHLEY CROWDER: Great. So yeah-- so you can see, you can actually use GLB across multiple different platforms. And the reason we picked GLB is because, if you know you need to go to the web, you're going to need a GLB file. But you can also use those within Unreal Engine and create the same experience in all different environments, which is huge.
So as a quick overview, if you're going 3ds Max to web viewers in Unreal Engine, you're going to want to make sure you download the Babylon export plugin. Complex materials with color corrections are really great for rendering, but they will not work in real time. So you either need to convert those to PBR materials, which is always hard to match, or do a bake, as we kind of walked you through.
And then, just as a note, Unreal doesn't always process normals correctly for GLBs. So if you download the VNTANA plugin or in the Unreal store for free, you can actually automatically correct those and not worry about it.
Great. So because we're at Autodesk and many of you also use Maya, we're going to walk through a Maya workflow, as well, with a little bit more of a complex asset. So in this case, we have a car, so a lot more complex than that cube stool. And I'm going to have Tyler walk us through that export on Maya as well.
TYLER: So the first thing that I like to do is just get the mesh prep out of the way. So this is going to be the initial stuff that we do for any export, and that's going to be freeze transformations and then delete all history. So to do that, I want to select all my mesh components. And a really easy way to do that is just I'm going to come up to my selection filter settings, and I'm just going to unclick everything that isn't a polygon. So that means, if I do a marquee selection, I'm only going to select the polygon objects in my scene.
And from there, I can go to Modify, Freeze Transforms, and then I can go to Edit, Delete All By Type, History. Perfect. Now that that's taken care of, we can go look at our materials. So we're going to select our asset, and we're going to open up the hypershade.
And then I'm just going to go to Graph, Graph Material on Selected, and you can see, we have our material. Now, the Babylon exporter prefers that we have our materials using either the Stingray material, the Maya standard surface material, or the Arnold standard surface material. We're using the Maya standard surface material.
Another thing to note is that after you export for the first time using the Babylon exporter, it's going to create a node called Babylon AI standard surface material node. This just holds some extra settings for our materials, like our transparency mode, and whether or not to enable backface culling. This is going to be really important, especially if we have some transparent materials. So if we do, I like to export the asset twice with the initial export, getting all of the Babylon standard surface materials added, and then the second export going back and editing some of the transparent settings to make sure that our assets come out right.
So for this, we don't need to change anything since it's a standard opaque material. And then we can take a look at our textures. So we have a generic diffuse color texture, where we have our out color going into our base color. And then we have a simple ORM, which is occlusion in our red channel, roughness in our green, and then metallic in our blue. And we're only using the metalness value, and we're plugging that directly into our metallic slot in our Maya standard material.
Let's go take a look at something a little bit more complex. So I'm going to open up-- I'm going to display the glass. So I'm going to graph material on selected. Now you can see, we have a little bit more of a complex material here. We have our alpha plugging into our opacity, and then we also have-- we're using our roughness channel, as well, and our-- so the green channel is getting plugged to our specular roughness, and our B is getting applied to our metallic.
Now, since this material is transparent, we need to make sure that our Babylon standard surface material nodes are set correctly. So that just means we need-- since this is glass, I'm changing the transparency mode to blend, and I'm going to turn off backface culling. This will just allow us to see the material properties on both sides-- or see the material on both sides of the polygon, the polygon plane.
And then, yeah, we should be good to go for our materials. So now we're ready to export. I'm just going to select everything, come up here to Babylon, Babylon File Exporter. This is going to bring up our export options. So here, we need to change the output format to GLB. This is where we can set a destination for our file. Hit Enter. And now we can set some of the settings. By default, the settings are perfect.
ASHLEY CROWDER: Yep. So yeah, then you hit Export, and then you get your GLB. And so we're going to just pop over back to our digital asset management system that we uploaded that to and check out our car. So this is great.
And so if I scroll down-- now, this is a way more complex asset than that stool. And so you can see the original file was 1.5 million polygons and over 100 megabytes in size. Try to upload that to the web, it would not work well. And so our intelligent algorithms got this down to about 150,000 polygons and 7 megabytes automatically.
You could always go in and adjust settings and over 40 different flags to play with. But it's nice that this just kind of automates it for you. So you have a lot of assets. You can get them all done and then kind of go back and see if you want to make any tweaks. I can now easily share this with link. Same as before. And I could have added some hotspots to call out the details of this amazing car. And same thing, automatically created that USDZ file so that you can use augmented reality. And we're automatically creating the optimized SBX, as well, to pull into different experiences. But now I'm just going to pop back over. And Tyler is going to walk us through, using our plugin to pull that into Unreal Engine.
TYLER: So we're going to click Download GLB. And this is going to download the GLB directly to our content folder in our project. And then after it's downloaded, it'll prompt us to import it into our project. So we're going to click Import. The default settings are perfect. So we're going to click Import again.
And now that our file has been imported into our scene, we can go check it out in our Content Browser. But before we do that, we have some tools that just help us make sure that our GLBs that we import are displaying correctly. So Unreal sometimes doesn't choose the right settings for our normal maps. So that's what this script does is it goes through and runs and fixes everything.
So now that we've run the script on the asset, we can close out of the plugin. We can go to Window, Content Browser. Now-- here we go. Now we can pull our asset over. So you can see that we have a VENTANA folder that it created, and we can go check out our asset.
So for assets that come in like this within multiple components, I like to put them into a blueprint. This just allows us to-- this allows a ton of things. One, it easily stores them, and it allows us to build in functionality, like you can change the color and things like that later on. It's just a really good thing to do.
So if I right-click in my Content Browser and I click Blueprint Class and I say Actor, this is going to create an actor blueprint. I'm going to name it "Car." And if I double-click on it, that's going to open up my Unreal blueprint.
And now I just want to make sure that I've selected all my static mesh components. I'm just going to drag and drop them into my actor blueprint. As you can see, they're in there. That's looking good. I can click Compile. Now that's done. I can close that. And I can move my Content Browser down, and I can just drag this into my scene. And now our car asset is ready to use in our Unreal Project. Hope this helps. Have a good day.
ASHLEY CROWDER: Awesome. So great. So that's showing you Maya to a real-time 3D and AR web viewer to Unreal. Kind of as a summary, you want to make sure you install that Babylon plugin, freeze transforms, delete history to start, and then you want to check your materials. So the Babylon plugin works best with Stingray, Maya standard surface materials, and Arnold. If you are using others, you could do different bake options.
And if you do have an asset that has many parts and complicated like a car or large, complex piece of equipment, it is really helpful to create a blueprint in Unreal to group all this together, because it allows you to do a lot of different things easier with that grouped asset.
Cool. So we walked through just the state of the industry, why this matters. Companies are seeing a huge impact to the bottom line from design, manufacturing, B2B sales, and consumer-facing experiences. So how do you do this in your organization? We're going to just walk through some best practices of how you can get started or evaluate your current 3D workflow.
So first you want to outline the organization workflow. What are the current design programs your team is using? Often there's multiple programs throughout the organization, depending on what artists and designers are most comfortable with. And then what groups of the organization need access to these 3D files? And that can be different versions, right? If you are building a highly complex technical product, you don't want everyone to have access to that. But if you optimize that and have things like OGR where it's stripping out everything on the inside, you just want to see what that looks like and be able to create a virtual 3D presentation without everything that's proprietary. That's possible.
So what groups of the organization need what types of file and what level of access for security and what actual file formats? Where are they trying to go? Are they collaborating in Miro or creating presentations in Canva or PowerPoint, creating virtual showrooms in Unreal Engine or simulations or trying to go to the web? Because all of that will dictate the file sizes and formats that those different groups need.
Next, you have a digital asset management system that can automate this 3D model processing for optimization and conversion. It can be a huge time suck to ask your engineering team to do that when they should be spending their time on R&D and improving your product. And then last, whatever platforms you choose, from PLM, DAM, CMS, you want to make sure that they have robust APIs, because the one thing you can guarantee is that change is constant. And you want it to be very easy to plug in to new systems and workflows.
Next, naming conventions and metadata. So you want to make sure that you set up ideal naming conventions across your team and that they adhere to that. And you might even be hiring outside vendors to create some of these 3D designs, and they definitely need to be adhering to these naming conventions so that, as you get those files into your organization, it's very easy for your team to manipulate and edit as needed.
And with this, you can also tie metadata to those assets. So we've integrated a lot of times with people's PLM system to automatically pull in the important product data and tie that to the 3D asset, which becomes really valuable because then the asset becomes intelligent in a way. So if you pull that into Unreal Engine or Unity and build unique simulations, you can use that data as an input mechanism to actually build a smart simulation.
And last, materials are everything for the look. So if you are using V-Ray or other pre-rendered materials and then trying to convert to PBR, just know, you might be driving yourself crazy. It is hard to get an exact match. But you can get very close, particularly with things like baking. But if you know the entire purpose of your 3D assets downstream is for real-time applications like game engines and web viewers, then you might want to start with PBR from the beginning. And Khronos is continuing to release extensions that are getting really realistic, and your renders might be able to be at the level with PBR that is good for your organization.
And the biggest recommendation I can have is, as an organization, having a centralized material library that your team can pull from and use is going to save them so much time and headache. So everyone is using these same red velvet or silver metal. So you're not comparing apples to oranges.
Substance is a really great tool that has a huge library or we've worked with a number of clients who've built their own internal library scanning their products. So yeah, I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or I'm just ashley@vntana.com. Thanks.
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