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At the point of personalization, where a user’s vision is transforming into reality, the digital canvas holds immense power. Unfortunately, this virtual stage can’t perfectly replicate the physicality of  brick-and-mortar displays. So the transaction relies solely on the trust that their customized masterpiece will truly translate into a physical treasure. This is where Spectrum’s industry-leading 3D assets step in, bridging the gap between imagination and possession with hyper-realism.

Spectrum meticulously crafts 3D models that mirror our clients’ products with absolute accuracy. Our investment in talent and cutting-edge technology fuels this mission, creating assets that set the industry standard. With each click and customization, users’ confidence grows, witnessing their vision come alive in real-time.This immersive interaction is the catalyst for conversion, turning hesitant browsers into proud creators.

This magic isn’t born solely from Spectrum’s 3D expertise, however. It’s a balance between our clients’ intimate product knowledge and our team’s 3D artistry. In this blog, we peel back the curtain, revealing the refined processes and checkpoints that transform products into 3D masterpieces.

PILLARS OF OUR PROCESS

Spectrum’s 3D expertise is guided by three unwavering principles – our north stars:

1. Efficiency and Scalability – we believe quality and quantity can co-exist, with intricate 3D models materializing at lightning speed. We leverage cutting-edge technology to streamline our workflow without compromising detail. The results – 2,500 product scans (and counting) 3D assets brought to life and a reusable fabric library of over 1,000 materials created using scanning and other industry methods
2. Quality – Our QA process is a rigorous series of steps, ensuring photorealism for each asset with the end goal of making flawless reflections of customized products.
3. Styling – Spectrum collaborates with your team to utilize and replicate the style of high-quality photography you provide and approve.

INSIDE OUR EXPERTISE

We’ve established the pillars that guide Spectrum’s development of hyper-realistic 3D assets. Now, let’s delve deeper into the process that transforms product data into visual masterpieces. Our mission is to bridge the gap between digital dreams and tangible products, and it starts with a dedication to unrelenting accuracy.

BUILDING our DATA sources

We begin with a deep dive into every aspect of your product, devouring as much information as possible, including:

• Brand-Supplied Mannequins: Approved and provided mannequins ensure perfect proportions and dimensions.
• Brand and Product Style Guides: From color palettes to textures, these guides inform every decision we make.
• Existing Product Photography: Existing high-quality images serve as invaluable references, allowing us to capture the intricacies of your product’s surfaces, lighting, and even the way it interacts with light.
• Internal Product Experts: When questions arise, we don’t hesitate to tap into the wisdom of your brand’s product experts. These on-the-ground heroes ensure every detail, from functional elements to decorative placements, translates flawlessly into the digital realm.

PROCESS VARIATIONS FOR DIVERSE PRODUCT CATEGORIES

While our core principles of efficiency, quality, and styling remain steadfast, the techniques of our 3D artistry vary depending on the canvas. Each product category, from fabrics to hard goods, presents unique challenges, and we pride ourselves on adapting our process to achieve unparalleled realism.

SOFT GOODS

For fabrics, digitally capturing the detailed essence of fabrics demands a unique approach. We use advanced scanning technology to translate intricate patterns and tactile nuances of polyester, cotton and other garment materials/textures into precise “fabric maps.” These maps become the blueprint, seamlessly tiling onto the 3D model and optimizing our customization efforts. Through this refined process of material capture, we’ve been able to cut the previous 4-12 hour process in half. Other details around our soft good process:

• Advanced post processing, such as tone mapping and color grading, provides balanced white and black levels to prevent color oversaturation
• High precision anti-aliasing techniques enhance detail and clarity
• Accurate lighting and shadowing helps reveal stitching and folds in fabrics
• Bleeding-edge draco compression technology allows us to render much higher-density models without sacrificing performance or load-time

DURABLE GOODS

Metals and plastics call for a different approach. Here, sample products become our key resources. We physically handle them, rotating them under various lighting conditions, observing how materials interact with light and shadow. This hands-on immersion gives our 3D team an invaluable understanding of the product, allowing them to translate its nuances into pixelated perfection. For accurate representation, we often combine this intimate knowledge with existing product photography and, when available, CAD files. This multifaceted approach ensures every curve and contour is captured with pinpoint precision.

ACHIEVING AND MAINTAINING COLOR CONSISTENCY

Color fidelity is paramount, and for durable goods, we prefer to use previously defined product lighting environments where possible. Replicating standardized lighting setups ensures custom 3D assets seamlessly mesh with existing stock photography, maintaining brand consistency across all visual platforms. Imagine your customer holding a physical product, admiring its color, and then seamlessly transitioning to your online store, where the 3D asset mirrors that same shade with astonishing accuracy. That’s the magic of our tailored color approach.

By customizing our process based on product categories, we ensure every 3D asset is not just visually stunning, but a faithful digital twin, ready to guide customers through their customization journey with unparalleled confidence.

BEST PRACTICES FOR TOP 3D ASSETS

1. The power of two – client knowledge + Spectrum expertise – collaboration is where the true magic happens. Your insights guide us, ensuring every detail, from subtle stitching to intricate patterns, is captured with unwavering accuracy. We become extensions of you, translating your product into a captivating digital twin.
2. Details are where trust takes root – Small details build trust with your brand fans. A misplaced button or an absent feature, can chip away at a user’s confidence. Spectrum meticulously obsesses over every nuance, ensuring your 3D asset mirrors your actual product with precision. This level of detail is the foundation of trust, convincing users their digital masterpiece will translate flawlessly into reality.
3. Realism that bridges between pixels and purchase – The best 3D assets blur the line between digital and physical. When users gaze at your 3D model, they shouldn’t just see pixels; they should see the finished product nestled in their hands. This realism instills confidence, eliminates hesitation, and transforms a hesitant browser into a converted sale.
4. Possibilities beyond the web – Spectrum’s 3D assets aren’t confined to the digital canvas. Their high-resolution quality makes them versatile tools, ready to be repurposed for marketing endeavors, AR/VR experiences, or even gracing the pages of your catalog. We build them light enough for a web environment, yet robust enough for diverse creative needs.

Studies have shown 3D visualization has a profound impact on consumer psychology and conversion. In fact, in one Shopify case study, shoppers were 44% more likely to add an item to their cart after interacting with it in 3D. And when users begin customizing their own 3D product, rotating and zooming in on their masterpiece, they build trust, drive conversion, and ultimately, bring your brand’s vision to life in every dimension.

Embroidery is a booming opportunity in product customization. The global market was over $2.5 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to nearly $6 billion by 2028, reinforcing how much consumers love the creativity and sense of craftsmanship embroidered designs bring. Precise stitching and mutli-colored designs are perfect for customizing soft goods such as uniforms, caps, coats, blankets, shirts and more. Whether it’s monogramming, patches, or even corporate branding for team gifts/swag, embroidery has huge untapped potential.

Unfortunately, at a commercial level, embroidery can be challenging. The need for manual oversight by embroidery artists and operators throughout the process makes scalable solutions difficult. Additionally, automated digitization processes often incorrectly predict overall stitch counts, mis-estimating them by anywhere from 10-50%, leading to unsatisfied customers and missed revenue opportunities.

Recognizing an opportunity, Spectrum set out to create a scalable and integrated embroidery solution for our clients. The end result is an online personalization experience that taps into the unique look of embroidery on a fan’s favorite products, bringing them confidence and increasing the likelihood of purchase. Here’s how we did it:

ACCURACY IN DIGITIZATION

When embroidery projects are inaccurately digitized, pricing and production issues quickly surface. To solve this problem, Spectrum applied our customization experience to the overall embroidery process, beginning with a validation process for user’s artwork at the initial point of customization, with the following criteria:

• Auto-detect image complexity (i.e. photos vs logos)
• Moderation monitoring for copyrights and trademark IP through Spectrum Protect
• DPI/resolution checking
• Overall validation to confirm logo sizing and material/stitch count fit

Once artwork is confirmed to be accurate and validated, Spectrum works with the highest quality digitization partner in the business to create a digitized logo exactly to the customer’s expectations.

COMMON EMBROIDERY FILE TYPES

Spectrum works with the two main file types within the industry:

1. DST: Data Stitch Tajima – the first format created that allows an embroidery machine to know where to place stitches. Unfortunately, this file type does NOT provide any color information, so an operator must assign thread colors.
2. EMB: Embroidery Format – Spectrum’s file format of choice, a proprietary format created by Wilcom and used by most industry machines. It utilizes attributes of the DST, but also contains color information.

1. Our process begins with user-uploaded files that are graded and evaluated to be print-ready
2. Spectrum embroidery technology provides the ability to edit and change individual thread colors within specific graphic elements

BRINGING ADDITIONAL COLOR OPTIONS

At a manual level, embroidery offers limitless color options, as thread colors can be changed to create infinite designs. Commercially, however, file types have limited color options, thus minimizing the creativity of embroidery. Spectrum solves that challenge by adding the ability to colorize artwork and isolate individual art elements for separate colors, within an .EMB file. Within our platform, logos are automatically scanned with this level of colorization, eliminating the need for re-scanning. Isolating design elements within a logo means brands are no longer limited to 1-color logos on their embroidered goods, and can be more true to their overall brand identity.

Spectrum’s technology makes it easy to colorize artwork and isolate individual art elements as separate colors.

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Embroidery brings a unique element of personalization – a classic sense of craftsmanship combined with creative opportunities. Spectrum has integrated the commercial details and nuances within our platform, so our clients can take full advantage of this embellishment without needing to worry about the nuances.

Spectrum’s primary goal is to be the best white-label solution for our clients. A brand’s e-comm site (and user experience) is a critically important touch point, so we work to ensure user’s full confidence by providing a seamless site experience. Extensive testing and ongoing optimizations with our clients has resulted in best-in-class customization interfaces that ensure users never realize a third party is involved.

HOW WE DO IT

Within our Spectrum Connect capabilities, formal user-testing is a key component in our process, providing innumerable short and long-term advantages. Testing parameters vary from client to client, but generally our user testing includes:

• Remote unmoderated user-testing
• Annual testing for existing clients, more frequently for newer programs 
• Recruitment for a minimum of 20 participants, with the following criteria:
  • Age demographic that matches brand’s consumer profile
  • Split between mobile and desktop users
  • Have purchased specific product in last year
• Session times vary specific to the need (average is a 15-min session)

AREAS WE FOCUS ON

With new clients, our user experience team works collaboratively with their e-comm teams to set up the initial customization program. The end goal is to optimize the experience throughout each step in the user journey, with particular attention to:

• Overall quality and comfort of user navigation 
• How users interact with 3D models
• Users’ ability to quickly understand customizable parts of the product 
• Navigation preferences and expectations when users have finished their customized product (or “recipe”) 
• “Add to Bag” process
• Observations for areas of hesitation, confusion or generally difficult interactions
• Overall value proposition for the user in customizing a product

For existing clients, user experience testing is a standard part of our annual QBRs, where we evaluate the previous 12 months of data and develop optimization recommendations. Our experience has shown custom product programs work best with constant optimization based on data, so we provide these evaluations as part of Spectrum’s overall service offerings. Regular feedback loops evolve and optimize our clients’ custom product programs. And while many of our recommendations are specific to that brand’s needs, we do provide recommendations influenced by successful initiatives with other clients.

SOME SAMPLE UX FINDINGS

Once our user-testing is complete, Spectrum synthesizes the data and provides recommendations to improve our client’s customization programs. Over the years, here are some findings and subsequent recommendations we’ve made to clients to optimize their custom product programs:

• Reorder custom options shown based on popularity, as well as eliminating ones that under-perform and replace with new options.
• Customization trends and data can influence changes to default product options 
• Certain options can be “locked up” when data shows consistent patterns of usage (i.e. users selecting the same design on left and right headphones)
• Tips on improving the brand’s custom product landing pages 
• Improved engagement when providing pre-defined images to serve as consumer inspiration and starting points
• Better results when the product customizer is in its own page vs. within a product detail page
• Users prefer actual font previews displayed in the options menu
• Insights for future marketing promotions based on custom product data, such as:
  • Product customization trends for unpredicted holiday opportunities 
  • Custom product interactions by day of week, allowing opportunities to align with other marketing efforts 
  • Additional data points to gauge success of partnerships and cross-promotions

How people use the internet is constantly changing, so Spectrum invests time in constant improvement and optimization of our clients’ custom programs. Implementing regular user testing services and recommendations ensures our clients remain on trend and impactful.

Spectrum has completed over 100 integrations across a variety of platforms and ecommerce technologies. And whether they come from existing clients, or prospects we’re speaking with, we’ve seen a pattern of questions about technical integration we felt we can address.

Our technology integrates with our clients’ ecomm systems on two levels:

• Front-end UX integration
• Back-end factory integration

FRONT-END UX INTEGRATION

Our primary goal is to be the best white-label solution for our clients. A brand’s ecomm site and experience is an extremely valuable touch point, so our goal is to ensure users never feel they are anywhere other than the brand’s website. Spectrum’s technology blurs the line between the customization interface and the brand site (i.e no odd frames or random URLs) so users never realize a third party is involved. 

These are some of the areas we focus on to to ensure our front-end integration remains the best in class:

• User experiences that fully integrate with brand look/feel/tone 
• Low code integration – front-end integration time is on the order of hours, not days
• Brands are able to retain full reign over site content, design and navigation since Spectrum technology rides on top of existing ecomm technology – no need to alter existing cart processes. 
• All pricing/product availability comes directly from clients’ databases, so product details are always up-to-date
• For cart/client management, the CTA is within the Spectrum interface, but is quickly handed over to clients’ existing checkout process, for a seamless user experience
• Spectrum platform provides the ability to save abandoned “locked recipes” from users, providing additional marketing opportunities through Spectrum Intelligence, and drawing on the inspiration of the customized experience

FACTORY INTEGRATION

Our 100% success rate for factory integration is a direct result of our unique process – we start by collaboratively defining final customized product states and options with our clients. Spectrum’s technology is the bridge between software and reality, so we define what is realistically possible with our clients’ products, and then work backwards to manifest that with our software. 

Ultimately, a successful integration is Spectrum’s responsibility – ensuring our clients can produce the item that looks exactly like what their users are seeing on screen. 

To achieve our 100% factory integration rate, these are a few processes and best practices we adhere to:

• Like many industries, the last mile in product customization is the hardest challenge to overcome. So this is where we place our focus, and what we use as our “North star” to drive future recommendations.
• Spectrum maps users’ custom product recipes and delivers these to your factory floor with an endless choice of file delivery options.
• Working backwards also helps us define opportunities for efficiency. Consumers’ delivery expectations are measured in days, not weeks, so we have a vetted list of production facilities that can help augment client facilities if necessary. 
• With the experience of over 100 integrations, we’ve developed a series of tools to help with facility integration, particularly when it comes to data and file format manipulation. 
• For any other needs, Spectrum offers an open API model to easily integrate into core business systems.

Ten years of product customization experience has reinforced that custom is custom. Your brand, products, options and factories are all unique so its important that your custom product experience accurately reflects it. We’re happy to put our experience of over 100 integrations to work, determining the best custom solution for your brand.

A large hurdle in developing a custom product program is finding a production solution that fits within the brand’s existing infrastructure and supply chain. Adding custom products in a customer flow requires levels of integration that may challenge legacy e-comm platforms, overwhelm teams and jeopardize the initiative. Any benefits of a successful custom program can be obscured by the challenges of integrating interfaces and data flow to make a smooth custom experience. 

With Spectrum Connect, we begin our integration process with your factory and production facilities, and work backwards to craft a custom solution. Our platform-agnostic technology ensures maximum flexibility, mitigates integration challenges and ensures success for our clients.

SAMPLE INTEGRATION TEST

If you would like to quickly emulate the loading of customized products into your existing e-comm system, we offer a quick and easy driver as a test. The driver enables your integration teams to load a sample product, add to cart, and ability to deliver an order acknowledgement. If all elements of the test integration are successful, the driver displays a corresponding message and visual to acknowledge the successful test. This easy test enables brands to evaluate custom product viability in hours and days, vs weeks and months typically needed vs. other systems. Read more information about common integration points between Spectrum and your ecommerce and factory teams here.

INTEGRATION WITH LEADING ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS

Like many industries, the “last mile” in product customization is the hardest challenge to overcome, so this is where the Spectrum team places the bulk of our focus. We collaborate with our clients to define what is realistically possible with their products, and then work backwards to manifest that with the Spectrum platform. At the end of the day, we consider integration to be our responsibility, making sure our clients can produce the item that looks exactly like what their users are seeing on screen.

With our “last-mile” focus, we have achieved a 100% factory integration rate across a wide variety of existing platforms. Below are the ecomm solutions we integrate with most often and some of our clients on those platforms.

If you do not see your system on that list, or if your e-comm solution is custom-built, no worries. Spectrum’s tech agnostic approach can work with your existing platform. Feel free to reach out if you have any specific technical questions as you consider adding a custom program to your e-comm program.

Product customization empowers your biggest fans to create their own unique masterpieces. Unfortunately that empowerment can come with potential risk since you are giving some of your brand control over to the consumer. Smart moderation tools and process provides a balance between the freedom your fans desire and adhering to brand and legal guidelines. 

Spectrum Protect, our cutting-edge AI moderation tool, helps brands protect against copyright infringements, vulgarities and inappropriate content by:

• Dictating the level of risk mitigation they are comfortable with
• Modifying the process to include human moderation and fit within their team’s workflow (i.e. when/how to request for human review capabilities)
• Defining the level of human involvement in the review process , reducing overhead associated with human moderation
• Scaling up for localization as moderation can be implemented across multiple languages

Protection across media

With Spectrum, consumers personalize products by inputting their own text, images and even audio files delivered via QR code. Giving this level of creative license to your brand fans drives deeper loyalty, but requires moderation as users are free to input and upload anything. To protect brand integrity and expedite the process, Spectrum Protect defines differences between profane material vs. IP- brand issues, providing pass/fail results.

The following two flowcharts show where Spectrum Protect plays a role within a typical moderation process for user-uploaded image and text:

FOR TEXT MODERATION

• Spectrum provides clients with a default deny list informed by over 10+ years of moderatioN
• Clients can fully customize text deny list with terms specific to their competition, industry, etc. 
• Users can request review from the brand, providing administrators with the ability to reject or approve individual cases

FOR IMAGE MODERATION

• AI can differentiate between inappropriate and copyright-protected content
• Advanced optical character recognition (OCR) can identify text embedded in an image allowing for detection of profane text within an image

for audio moderation

• Files are delivered via URL or QR code
• Audio is scanned to ensure brand adherence – if not, users are prompted to re-record their message.
• AI-powered brand protection against vulgarities and copyright-related material. 

Product customization allows your biggest brand fans to personalize your products to best fit their personalities. Without stifling their creativity, it is still important to set guidelines to protect your brand long-term. Spectrum Protect and our AI moderation tools provide efficient and well-tested methods to save teams time and money while safely protecting your brand.

A customized program turns your products into a canvas to design masterpieces exactly to their standards (but within your brand guidelines), investing their time and making it their own. In fact, Spectrum clients see an average 5X increase in time-on-site with users customizing products.

Spectrum Creator is the technology that supports these customization capabilities within our industry-leading 3D platform. Creator provides your users with a full suite of tools to work with, such as colors, text treatments, photo integrations and more. As users personalize their products, options are updated and displayed in real time, encouraging trial and deeper exploration. 

Some of the more popular options available within Spectrum Creator include:

• Photo upload and integration – providing users with the ability to upload and integrate any image they can legally use. AI-powered moderation tools through Spectrum Protect help brands moderate photo usage for our clients.
• Text treatments – providing users with multiple fonts and pathing options, even monograms to personalize gifts further

• Additional art – design options such as configurable patterns, templates, and graphic libraries 
• Recipe packs – allow for bulk orders with consistent custom product recipes where 1-2 options vary slightly (a roster of jerseys with consistent logo but different names, for example)
• Color Options – letting users alter the colors of your product and accessories to create the exact combination they want.

Humans value what we spend time on, and the same principle applies with product customization. Spectrum clients routinely see much higher rates of conversion and profit margins on custom SKUs. Additionally, Spectrum Creator provides brands:

• Higher rates of conversion and profit on custom SKUs
• Sample designs to inspire further exploration
• Adaptability with influencer or co-branded assets to nimbly align with marketing efforts
• Seasonality by pairing stock SKU’s with time-sensitive/seasonal artwork 
• Incremental word-of-mouth and social sharing through personalization

Product customization inspires users to express themselves with their favorite brands and products. Spectrum Creator provides the palette by which brand fans can create the exact masterpiece for themselves or as a gift.

Users who customize products are your most loyal fans, generating valuable primary data as they invest their time on your site. Harnessed properly, this data provides brands great opportunities for remarketing and retargeting as custom orders are left in shopping carts. And once they’re ordered, custom products have administrative needs like any other products, to administer orders, track overall sales, monitor conversion rates, track revenue and much more. 

Spectrum Intelligence is the technology that allows our clients to track and administer the customization activity on their site, unlocking the best benefits to product customization. When a user has finalized their design and shared, saved or put in a cart, this saved “recipe” becomes the basis for the two main capabilities Spectrum Intelligence provides: reporting and administration.

REPORTING

Custom SKUs convert at a much higher rate and with higher profit margins. Imagine monitoring custom product sales in real time, demonstrating the value of your product customization program. Spectrum Intelligence provides proprietary data insights with licensable advanced reporting that allows our clients to:

• Refine and optimize the brand’s custom program based on real-time order data
• Understand and guide long-term product trends based on custom product data (such as popular color combinations and option configurations) 
• Optimize remarketing and retargeting opportunities with custom recipes user have saved
• Continually evaluate UX and landing page efficacy

ADMINISTRATION

Spectrum Intelligence provides industry-leading administrative tools that deliver:

• User and order management through varying levels of brand team member access 
• Real-time component management to ensure consumers only make factory-available selections
• Ongoing management of available personalization elements such as stock and promotional art, prints, patterns, fonts and more

uses of data and reporting

Valuable and unique customization data, provided by Spectrum Intelligence, can be used to:

Product customization is the one type of personalization that truly deepens the relationship between consumers and brands, and the data generated provides a depth of insights into your products and loyal fans that you never knew possible.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Spectrum 3DTrue, our newest rendering engine that brings our clients’ products alive with crystal-clear, photo-realistic 3D. 3DTrue’s best-in-class visualization offers high-level animated states, multi-variant lighting and true to life material representation. With 3DTrue,  the variety and complexity of materials are represented with 100% accuracy,  including glass, translucent plastics, iridescents, detailed fabric, metallics and much more. Lastly, 3DTrue is future-proofing today’s 3D assets with the ability to apply existing product aesthetics to future product images, saving time and money on future photoshoots. 

See below for more details:

Unique Capabilities of 3DTrue

Image Based Lighting

Image Based Lighting (IBL) is a technique in which we are able to dynamically light 3D scenes, assets, or environments using an .HDRI image instead of only using 3D lights.

• 3DTrue captures real-world light, and simulates how that environment would physically impact a 3D asset, leading to more realistic looking models. 
• We can leverage clients .hdri images to exactly match their existing product lighting requirements for increased consistency.
• Can be used in conjunction with 3D lights for the optimal look.

Physically Based Rendering (PBR)

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) is a way to render a 3D object using properties that mimic how light interacts with objects in the real world.  PBR materials have specific properties (roughness, metalness, diffuse/albedo, normals) and can be created using industry standard software. 

Spectrum uses an array of industry standard approaches to author materials following a PBR workflow, allowing the team to seamlessly integrate them into our pipeline to be visualized over the web.

Real-Time Rendering

Real-time rendering is the act of rendering 3D models and textures in a live environment, such as via a website/WebGL. This is critical for Spectrum because, unlike some 3D customizers, we aren’t just rendering still images and switching between them. Our process more closely resembles video game development by rendering products right before your eyes.

Keyframe Animation/Rigging Capabilities

When animation can assist in demonstrating a product’s full benefit, 3DTrue utilizes keyframe animation to create fluid and complex animation movements. Keyframe animation provides the ability to use a rig, allowing for rigid animations, where no product part is being bent, deformed or stretched during the animation, such as a knife opening from its handle

Glow and Emissive Properties

With these tools, we are able to use the emissive properties of materials to have parts of a model cast their own light.

Translucency

Translucency is the physical property of semi-transparent materials and how light passes through them. By utilizing translucency, we can more realistically represent products with transparency, such as jewelry and glassware.

Clear Coat

Clear coat is a 3D property of a material that simulates the coating of a transparent layer of paint over a colored layer. Commonly used when rendering car models, clear coat allows Spectrum 3DTrue to provide more realistic looks for any product that is manufactured with a similar process.

Anistropy

Anistropy is a special property where the shape of light reflection changes based on the direction from which it is viewed. This allows 3DTrue to render specific materials more realistically such as brushed metal, vinyl, and velvet.

Camera Animation

With 3DTrue technology, we now have the ability to animate models within our scene as well as the camera itself. This allows us to create dramatic entrances and effects within customizers, and support a range of dynamic movements.

Post Processing Effects

3DTrue provides a host of capabilities for applying specific filters and 2D effects after the image is processed on the screen, in real-time 3D. This opens a whole new world of dynamic and efficient effects that can be applied to our clients’ models, mimicking how real-life cameras operate. Effects include:

• Bloom:  Mimics how light is imperfectly captured within a real camera lens, as a gaussian effect where the light spreads out.

• Chromatic Aberration: Captures how colors are imperfectly rendered within a real-life camera.

• Depth of Field: Represents how a camera focuses on elements within the scene.

• Grain: Imitates film grain on a camera, for more realistic filmic scenes.

• Color Processing:Includes various settings and filters that can affect how colors are interpreted by a camera and rendered within our 3D scenes.

.GLB/.GLTF Support

We offer support for the two most ubiquitous file formats in 3D animation, allowing us to render and integrate multiple file formats with minimal effort. 

• GLTF is a file format for 3D scenes that aims to become the “JPG” of 3D file formats, a standardized format that will work across multiple platforms 
• .GLB differs from GLTF in that it allows textures and animations to be directly compressed within it instead of being referenced externally. Platforms like Facebook are starting to standardize this format, which will make 3D products easier to share across social media.
• Spectrum uses .GLB files a bit differently than other 3D programs. We don’t use the texture information imbedded in the files, allowing us to set-up assets to be more customizable 
• We also are able to work with .OBJ, .FBX, .STP and .STEP file formats

Component Swapping

This capability allows for live swapping between models on a webpage. One model is rendered and easily switched to another, sometimes accompanied with a real-time animation, without a page refresh.

Sub-surface Scattering  

Sub-surface scattering is the physical diffusion of light within a semi-translucent material, such as the glow of your skin when you hold a flashlight up to your hand, and is utilized to achieve greater realism of products.

Please reach out if you’d like a more in-depth demonstration of Spectrum’s 3DTrue capabilities and how they can benefit your ecommerce program.

As the Spectrum Customizer has grown, we’ve learned some products, and categories, lend themselves to product customization more readily than others. In the highly-competitive technology category, it’s critical for brands to avoid becoming a commodity or building a “me too” image. For this category, offering product customization is a great way to differentiate the brand, while also creating unique points of contact and engagement with their top fans.

Generally speaking, technology consumers thrive on expressing themselves through the products they buy, leveling up their product experience with uniqueness when possible. One need only look at the custom subculture in gaming and music as examples of this underlying trend. Unfortunately, in a category where consumers demand innovation and have a passion for self-expression, few brands capitalize on those audience needs, falling into a potential parity trap.

For brands interested in providing product customization, it is critical to find the best customization opportunities with product lines. Spectrum helps our clients evaluate product popularity, velocity, release schedules, product styling and ease of embellishment to determine the best product customization opportunities. Within the technology sector, these types of options can take a variety of forms, such as:

• Personal photos wrapped around a Bluetooth speaker 
• Custom graphics for removable headphone tags
• Color and texture options for gaming controllers

As users spend time customizing their favorite products, the quality of the user experience must inspire their confidence. The best brands deliver a seamless UX brand experience, combined with high-quality product images, allowing potential buyers to thoroughly inspect their custom product at every angle and purchase confidently, resulting in far fewer dissatisfied customers. In fact, this type of product experience and inspection perfectly aligns with an audience that is inherently technology-focused.

However, on-screen customization without the ability to effectively deliver user-designed files to a factory is useless. Spectrum begins our process at this point, working backwards, ensuring 100% factory integration with our clients and production facilities. If your existing production facilities may not be able to easily handle custom production, Spectrum has over 45 factory partners across the world that can augment your facilities, providing multiple options to fulfill your tech audience’s wishes.

If you’re looking to take advantage of your strongest brand advocates, and give them ways to express themselves with your products, consider adding a product customization platform and separating yourself from your competition.