With the Sayduck Platfrom users can create, manage and publish engaging visuals for their products in both 3D and Augmented Reality. Leading design brands such as Alessi, Kristalia and Vallila Interior trust the platform to create accurate representations of their products every day. We spoke with Niklas Slotte from Sayduck about adding true photorealistic rendering to an already great platform and why they chose RealityServer to get the job done.
In November 2019, Sayduck announced the introduction of photorealistic rendering. With a single click, non-technical managers can create highly realistic product images, removing the need for expensive traditional photography. The experience is seamlessly integrated with the already highly polished Sayduck platform and is a great way to use RealityServer. Let’s hear more about how it came together from Niklas.
Give us the 30,000ft view of Sayduck.
Our vision with Sayduck, and the Platform especially, is to make 3D and AR product presentations simple, fun and achievable by anyone. Typically, working with 3D has required a specific skill set and our goal has always been to make all of this simple, so that every ecommerce manager can easily empower their business with immersive 3D product experiences.
The Sayduck Platform is specifically designed with products in mind, which means that our data management is designed to make things like product variant management and product configurability very efficient.
As our customers build their products on the platform, manage related 3D assets and publish products for Web 3D and AR, it’s natural that we want to provide also other relevant use cases for 3D. Providing a server side rendering solution makes a lot of sense in this case.
What problem were you trying to solve when you found RealityServer?
We wanted to find a scalable server side rendering solution that could produce great looking render results and that would also integrate nicely with our current platform architecture and server environment (AWS).
It’s imperative for us that we can easily scale up the rendering part of the platform when demand goes up – and RealityServer supports this very nicely.
For our users we wanted to create the most simple one-click rendering solution we could think of. Thanks to great support from the RealityServer team we could quickly move forward with our beta version of the rendering feature and produce great looking images for our customers.
Clearly there was demand from your customers for full photorealism. How was this affecting your business?
Some of our client expressed the need to produce highly realistic images for print use and our old in-house solution could only generate “real-time” visualisation up to 1k. We wanted to take this up a notch and knew that we will need a separate server rendering solution to achieve this.
Our customers are happy that they can now create high-res images for their needs that also, from a visual point of view, are superior to the real-time 3D visualisation as more computational time is spent on the images.
What alternatives did you evaluate prior to choosing RealityServer?
We were evaluating a number of other cloud rendering services and other similar options. Our challenge was to find a solution that would allow us to do a proper integration with our Platform that would have the ability to scale and where we would have full control of every aspect.
Why did you choose RealityServer in the end?
It’s always a combination of many things in the end. We were really happy about the great service and support during the whole process. Also, RealityServer was precisely what we were looking for in terms of scalability and features.
In your announcement you quote a very interesting study stating that 35% of marketers say creating engaging visuals is their top struggle. How is photorealistic rendering helping to solve this problem for them?
Creating good looking content as fast as possible (as cheap as possible) is the norm for many online retailers and product manufacturers. The challenge is that some product categories, especially in furniture, allow a lot of flexibility and customization. Products come in different fabrics / materials and configurations – still, ideally, the customer should be able to see and understand what they are buying. Photorealistic rendering will inspire customer confidence when every option is available for visual preview.
Are standards such as glTF and open formats like USD helping your business, even though the technical details are often not exposed to the end user?
glTF is currently the native format of the Sayduck Platform – it’s a great standard and format to manage 3D data. The challenge in general is that there are a lot of different formats out there and also new ones being introduced time to time. One would hope that the industry giants would agree on one format that would be widely supported across platforms / devices / OS’s etc.
We’ve added a few features recently as a direct result of your input. How important is this kind of responsiveness to you when choosing a solution provider?
The responsiveness of the RealityServer team has always been fantastic and this is of course important when choosing a technology partner. Also, we’re happy that the feedback we have provided has been perceived as valuable and we are amazed how quickly these ideas were put into implementation.
Is there anything you’d like to say to others who might be evaluating their options for photorealistic rendering?
I highly recommend looking into and evaluating RealityServer. It’s a very competitive solution and the service and support is fantastic!
Niklas Slotte, CEO at Sayduck.
Niklas co-founded Sayduck in 2012 in Helsinki and has been the CEO since 2015. He’s been lucky to first hand experience both the inception and swift development and growth of the AR / VR / XR industry to the big promise of an exciting future that it is today. Sayduck was acquired in summer 2019 by Swedish Bublar Group, the leading publicly listed XR-technology company in the Nordics.
It’s always great to hear more about how our customers are actually using RealityServer. We’re glad to see that such easy to use solutions are being built that expose the technology to a much wider audience. While we focus on providing the best platform we can to developers, it’s our customers who often create the tools the end-user will actually see.
Why not sign up for Sayduck today and give it a go? If you’ve been interested in what RealityServer offers but you’re not a software developer then Sayduck might be a great option for you. You can easily import your 3D data, add and edit materials and importantly for customisable products, create variants. Publishing to 3D for web pages, AR or photorealistic renders is then trivial. It’s a really slick platform!
Paul Arden has worked in the Computer Graphics industry for over 20 years, co-founding the architectural visualisation practice Luminova out of university before moving to mental images and NVIDIA to manage the Cloud-based rendering solution, RealityServer, now managed by migenius where Paul serves as CEO.