In our eyes, virtual fashion and its relevant technologies are rising from the traditional fashion industry. We see its potential in both improving the conventional hand-craft working process and exploring new ways of fashion presentation. During the research of first sprint we were exposed to a large range of possible directions of virtual fashion.
We made a documentation for what we had researched in this sprint to keep track of our ideas and concepts, as well as some valuable findings.
see the Documentation Sprint 1
Our assigners are Van de Velde and Studio Jacob Kok. The former is a Luxurious Lingerie producer and seller who focuses a lot on providing the perfect fit bra and a good customer experience. They hope with 3D technology they are able to use the realistic simulation of the human body and fabrics to improve their current working process. In contrast, the latter is exploring more in the virtual world and paying much attention to one’s virtual identity. Jacob Kok, an independent designer who already got tired of the “traditional seduction”, is putting more efforts in dealing with the virtual elements and giving out new forms of presentations.
After several meetings with them we made visual maps for the general fashion producing process, and looked into every link in the process to see the possibilities of applying virtual fashion in the future. For the user research we had an interview with some fashion design students from AMFI and Rietveld Academie, from whom we got some very interesting insight for our project.
While keep getting input from our clients to know more about their current working process and future aims, we also started researching on new media and new technologies to see what is possible. One important user story in this sprint is to research some popular fashion design softwares and make a comparison analysis of them. Thanks to Amber’s efforts we finally made a poster listing the values of different parameters of 4 3D design softwares: Lectra, Marvelous Designers 4, DC Suite 5 and Optitex. This comparison is a very valueble output of this sprint.
see the Comparison Analysis Form
As an import research of our project, we looked into different techniques of 3D modelling and animation. We experienced the 3D scanner in AMFI and studied some articles about breast movements. After interviewing Freark, who is a computer animation specialist, we realised that Maya is very powerful software in 3d modelling and animation, and it is necessary for us to master some skills in 3d modelling and animating characters. So we start to have maya lessons (given by Michael) within the group to get more familiar with it. We also looked into some plug-ins for maya which can be used to simulate clothes.
Next sprint we are going to explore more into our concepts and potential technologies such as cloth simulation and motion capture. We are happy about the research we did in the first sprint, which laid a very good foundation for the next sprints.