"We have an exciting partnership with one of Europe’s leading 3D experts, colormass. Based in Berlin and specialists in the furniture industry, they have created a number of images for both ourselves and our customers – perfectly capturing the intricate detail necessary for furniture and textile photography. Allowing you complete creative freedom and control, colormass can be an effective way to ensure your furniture is represented in the highest quality – without the expense typically associated with traditional photography shoots."
Karl Hallam
Group Marketing Manager
Camira makes more than 8 million metres of fabric a year. Their team of innovators design and make some of the world's most adventurous and environmentally sensitive fabrics. Their expertise covers wool spinning and polypropylene yarn manufacturing, yarn dyeing, weaving on dobby, jacquard and plush looms, technical knitting, textile finishing and upholstery services.
With Camira, our very first test project was a relatively simplistic but stylish chair model, to showcase their fabric on a piece of furniture (see the very first image on the right). Camira were due to launch their new website and needed a series of fabric application images. We felt confident that CGI photography was the perfect way of delivering a variety of different images within a short timescale. Camira were thrilled with the initial test project and so commissioned a catalogue of CGI images, with the support of a freelance designer for art direction.
With the test project being so well received, we went on to produce a catalogue of images, where Camira could showcase their fabric on a variety of models from Contract office furniture to Transport installations. You can see more examples on the right. Again, colormass delivered the catalogue of photorealistic renders in a cost effective, timely way, which helped them achieve their website launch date.
After a few virtual photoshoot projects together with Camira, they also decided to utilize the colormass 3D configurator technology to showcase products in 3D for an exclusive launch: 200 year anniversary of providing transport textiles. Since colormass offers a simple one-link integration adding the 3D configurator of the product to the website was an easy task. There was a custom logic that Camira wanted to implement on the website which was: displaying two versions of the configurator. On the main page (where the fabrics are listed) showing each configuration without any configuration buttons and then a detailed page where the UI for all the configuration options were shown. Thanks to the colormass configurator API implementing this logic was straight forward. You can find the configurator here (if you click on View in 3D on the right side): camirafabrics.com/en/fabrics/bus-and-coach/aura
Another innovative aspect of the configurator is the fact that it also offers an on the fly AR generation. What does it mean exactly? There are tens of thousands of variations that you can click together for any of the bus seats. Almost all AR technologies on the market require you to prepare an AR model for each variation. Preparing these 3D models by hand is a big investment that would have cost a fortune for Camira (even if per AR model you calculate with a 10 Eur charge the end sum would be well over 100.000 Eur) but luckily with the colormass 3D infrastructure there is no need for manually prepare each AR model variation (no matter what these variations look like).
Whilst producing the catalogue of images for the website, we quickly realised we could create a service with Camira for furniture manufacturers who wanted Colormass to produce CGI imagery. If the model used Camira Fabrics we would liaise with Karl Hallam, Group Marketing Manager to arrange for fabric to be shipped free of charge, whilst we would scan the fabric for free. Creating a superior service to mutual customers and further embedding our relationship with Camira as their photorealistic CGI partners.