The Timex Group has joined the growing list of household names who use RealityServer to create the imagery that pushes customers to choose their products over a competitors. The retail sector demands the highest quality imagery in order to replace traditional photography with photorealistic 3D rendering. Not just quality, but speed and scale in everything from real-time, interactive and offline rendering.
migenius remains the secret weapon of many businesses that you already know and use. While we are rarely able to disclose publicly that these businesses are our customers, we are very pleased to be able to give a glimpse of what the Timex Group has been doing with RealityServer.
RealityServer really comes into its own when dealing with highly customisable products, anywhere you have a large number of components, material options and combinations in which they can be assembled. Combined with mass production, this is referred to as Mass Customisation. You can learn more in our post from over four years ago which still remains relevant today on Photorealistic Rendering for Mass Customisation.
Mass customisation need not be limited to cases where the consumer is in control of the configuration. Increasingly businesses are using this process internally to rapidly spin up their own new product iterations based on a large inventory of components and choices they have at their disposal.
To the right you can see an example rendering produced by Timex Group using their RealityServer based system. Users are able to fully interact with their products at this quality level as they design.
In a recent article by TechTarget on the many use cases of HPC (High Performance Computing), migenius, Tacton/Technicon and Timex Group were featured as a key example of how the power of NVIDIA GPU hardware and photorealistic rendering is being used to solve critical business problems. You can read the full article here (jump to Time is of the essence: Photorealistic 3D rendering in the cloud).
For the Timex Group, that problem was the need for their designers to mix and match the many available components into watch designs that look great and sell. Part lists alone don’t do the job, they have to see exactly what the watch will look like before committing to make it a product. Combining a powerful configuration engine as provided by Tacton with the visual output possible with RealityServer was the answer. From the article.
To find answers, the company [Timex Group] sorted through some 15 vendors in a global search, ultimately finding Swedish company Tacton Systems, which has software that enables the combining of components, and an Australian company, Migenius, that makes 3D photorealistic rendering software called RealityServer. The two together provide the timepiece customization system.
To make the process truly usable, designers needed to be able to see their selections in real-time and make interactive changes, viewing the watch from any angle in the process. Only then can finalised designs be created after which exactly the same system can be used to produce high quality image suitable for use on websites, catalogues and anywhere else visuals are needed.
When virtually everything about a product can change dynamically, solutions like WebGL and compositing just can’t achieve the speed and quality needed. While we’ve added compositing technology to RealityServer to cover the limited use cases where it works (e.g., simpler colour or texture changes), many of our customers still choose to go the fully rendered route.
This allows products to be designed and configured with no compromise on quality, modelling complexity and material accuracy. Using NVIDIA MDL based materials also ensures longevity and re-usability of content that has been created. Now a fully Open Source technology, MDL (Material Definition Language) provides a platform independent way to specify materials for 3D rendering.
To show the level of quality, interactivity and performance RealityServer can achieve we built a small demonstrator using a generic watch model we sourced, NVIDIA vMaterials and a little bit of very straight forward programming with RealityServer.
This shows a tiny fraction of what is possible with the RealityServer platform. Most of our customers have product selection matrices with unique product versions running into the millions, billions and beyond. At this level automation is a must. Having artists create product imagery by hand just isn’t feasible. The Timex Group are just one example of how smart businesses are using RealityServer to get the visuals they need faster, with the quality they demand.
Contact us to learn more about the RealityServer platform and how it can help your business.
Chris has over 20 years of direct experience and deep knowledge of 3D project management systems and high speed physical based rendering technologies. As former CEO and co-founder of Luminova, a specialist 3D visualisation and application development group, some 3,000 projects were successfully delivered to many of the world’s largest companies, over a 13 year period. Since 2011 Chris has been a partner and co-founder of migenius, the home of the cloud based RealityServer solution platform.