FFD | Future Fashion Design Real-time, Accurate Fabric to Garment Virtual Prototyping in Collaborative Environments

The Future Fashion Design (FFD) project aims to remove the main barriers inhibiting the wider adoption of Virtual Prototyping (VP) by textile and clothing companies by drastically improving the speed of obtaining realistic garment simulations, the accuracy of textile simulation and functional integration aspects. A new business model will offer strong improvements in product development efficiency and services at low-cost while opening new market opportunities for CAD and PDM/PLM system vendors. The main business objective of FFD is to enable fashion development teams to unleash their full joint creativity potential in an open, online collaborative system featuring rich 3D virtual representations, where the virtual is very close to the real. A major goal of the project is to drastically reduce the time to production for a complete new collection. In detail, the project targets several challenging aspects of current VP solutions with focus on improving the simulation accuracy to enable a purely virtual prototyping solution from the weave pattern to the final garment. A parallel textile simulation engine based on multi-core architectures to speed up current simulation approaches will be developed. This will also provide additional computing resources to enhance the accuracy of the simulation and the textile rendering in all phases. A Collaborative Design and Prototyping platform (CDP) for enhancing distributed development based on these new, purely virtual prototyping technologies will also be developed. One additional result of this project will be a new business and production workflow. These newly developed business and production workflows will be evaluated and tested by two end-user companies. They will integrate the VP platform in joint product development processes and evaluate and demonstrate its efficiency and impact. Various exploitation schemes will be adopted, including newly packaged VP fabric and garment solutions, integrated fabric-garment design and VP offers, and a joint exploitation of the CDP platform through a SaaS approach. The FFD business model will offer drastic improvements in product development efficiency (reduced number of physical samples from 20% to 100%, time-to-market reduced by several weeks, intensified collaboration between fabric and garment producers), services at low-cost (open, vendor independent and scalable platform), while opening new market opportunities to vendors of CAD and PDM/PLM systems. Virtual prototyping can be used in every stage of the current garment design process, but its full potential can only be enabled though an integrated approach in all stages of the production chain.