This is not your office document scanner - it’s state-of-the-art, high-resolution matching of colour and the finest details.
Digital fabric twin. You’ve seen and heard the phrase, you’ve seen the texture library on our website and now you want to know more. Whenever a new technology emerges, there’s a desire to see and understand its unique characteristics to see what sets it apart from the rest. There’s also natural curiosity to see who in the industry has the same technology and can replicate the product.
As the experts in the field of fabric digitisation, we understand that change is both exciting and can be confusing without proper knowledge of the processes behind the marvel. While you might not need to understand how the microchips of your smartphone work, you do want to know about screen size, resolution, memory capacity, camera lenses, battery life and processing speed. Same goes for digital fabric twins and we’re sharing some information on our tech.
All The Bells And Whistles
One can’t produce great digital imagery without top-quality equipment. And, to create perfect replicas of physical fabrics, it requires the finest equipment on the market. Our scanners are ultra high resolution with multiple cameras, more than 20 LED lights for clear illumination and the ability to capture and process a scan within 30 minutes, depending on the size required.
As with all equipment, different features work better in some situations than others. Just like you use your tablet for different purposes and tasks than your smartphone, a mix of scanners allows Twinbru to capture different fabrics and textures optimally.
Once the fabric is scanned, the logical question is how to process that data. The inability to capture and manage complex material appearance data in a single, editable, portable file format has been an obstacle to improving the virtualization of products. To achieve consistency in the colour and appearance of a scan of a fabric, file format is important.
For this reason, digital fabric twins are created as highly specialised file formats. These file formats are exclusively designed for storage of measured digital appearance and are compatible with a wide variety of rendering engines. Having all this machine power is great but it can mean nothing without some very knowledgeable humans to manage the data.
The Human Element
Our specially trained team at Twinbru know exactly how to achieve the best quality result possible repeatedly with their expert knowledge of the equipment and the scanning process. Having digitised thousands of physical fabrics, they have created a vast texture library and worked with virtually every type of fabric, from the complex patterns of jacquard to luxe velvets with metallic sheen. Each fabric performs differently in the scanning process and each one must be captured accurately. It’s also vital that the processed data is consistent in file size and application to 3D renders, particularly room scenes where the light conditions can be altered.
Matching the colour is critically important and this is down to the scanners being calibrated correctly. Our experts manage and maintain the machines to keep them running smoothly and ensure we get a perfect match, even with the darkest charcoal or black fabrics.
Let’s Get Ready To Render!
Now when it comes to rendering these scans of the fabric, Twinbru has the on-demand computing power of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. We render models 400 times faster than before, reducing the total time to create hundreds of thousands of digital renders from months to weeks. Using AWS makes rendering more flexible, too, because we can fire up a new render node, on the fly, if there is a large batch of models to process. With Spot Instances, Twinbru has run up to 2,000 render nodes simultaneously and, since migrating to AWS, we have produced more than 700,000 renders.
For Twinbru, the key elements of our technology are accuracy, quality of the scan, the amount of material qualities captured, as well as the scanning area size and capture speed. If the proof is in the pudding, then our texture library is a feast for the eyes and mind.
Sharing Is Caring
In a market eager for something new, it may seem odd that we so willingly share details of our process and equipment. The fact is that we believe in innovation. Twinbru itself was built as a result of a desire for innovation within the textile industry. But, innovation cannot come about throughout the industry without sparking curiosity and change by sharing knowledge.
New apps, new ways of working and new ways of doing business quickly appeared in recent years because so many businesses and industries were willing to share their perspectives and their innovation with the world. Twinbru’s digital fabric twins have many benefits for businesses in more than one sector and we aim to be drivers of forward-thinking transformation for the digital era.
What makes our digital fabric twins special goes beyond our unique technology and our team of experts with their collective specialised knowledge. It is that it has the power to create change and help your business stand out from the crowd. Be the business that is innovative by including our innovation into your future-oriented operation. When your peers and industry colleagues ask you about the technology that is leading transformation, you can tell them all about Twinbru.
Contact us today to explore the possibilities for your business