A 99.9% reduction in production time. Yep, you read that right.
I bet I know what you are thinking. Everyone’s thinking it. It’s all we talk about on LinkedIn anymore…
AI can create huge efficiencies.
It’s true, for some things.
But sometimes it’s not AI that makes the biggest difference. AI may be involved, but it’s not the main ingredient. It’s more about the boring stuff. The stuff that builds up and behind the scenes takes up a ton of time.
It’s not AI that fixes this problem, it’s automation.
Why did you hire designers?
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a large footwear brand. They were ready to start making some major changes to their 3D pipeline to create greater efficiencies and greater output. They were needing to service more and more parts of the business, and couldn’t keep up without killing their team. They wanted to scale output without increasing headcount.
With the current environment around AI, most companies would look to this new technology and ask how it can be implemented to do more. And that’s what most companies do. They start to look at AI as a creative partner, see how it can do more of the design work.
We didn’t go there.
Why would we “hire” AI to accelerate or take over the creative work? The first question is, “Why does creative take so long? Why can’t designers and artists do more?”
You were either hired as a designer or artist or hired them because of a beautiful portfolio of incredible visuals. You wanted their vision, their creativity. But that’s not really the majority of what they do. You didn’t hire them because they were awesome at wrangling huge amounts of data, renaming files, matching color swatches, or any of the other non-artist things that end up being a part of their job, but that becomes the reality, for now.
You hired them, or were hired, to create art.
80% Wasted time.
When I started working with this team, the first thing we did was map out their 3D process. What I found was not unique to them. It was a problem I’ve seen at an incredible amount of companies that I have worked with.
The problem? Artists and designers were only doing art and design 20-30% of the time. The other 70-80% of their time was wrangling data. Moving files. Renaming files. Doing the mind-numbing things that were “part of the job”, but had noting to do with their expertise.
I know. I did it for years. It was just a necessary evil and I just accepted it. Because there was no alternative.
But there is. It’s not flashy. It’s not exciting.
But it can create HUGE ROI.
99.9%
What I saw when I started with this team was that they were spending hours of their day just eye dropping color samples from a PDF file, and then manually pasting that data into other applications. They had to do this for 10s of product colorways each season. Creating colorway variants in 3D was a manual process that was gumming up their entire process.
So the first thing I did with them is identify the biggest bottleneck, and figure out a way to fix it.
I got to work looking at ways that would expedite the work, and we came up with a really elegant way to completely automate all of that work.
Now, that exact process can be batched for all colorways at once. Not only does it get all colors from every colorway (RGBA, Pantone, CMYK), but it organizes them by colorway name, then goes into the 3D rendering application, creates material instances, organizes them, names them, and applies them to a 3D object correctly.
It used to be nearly 9 hours of work for 25 colorways (that’s the average for a delivery).
Now it takes a couple of button clicks and 30 seconds.
AI didn’t do that. Automation did.
Let the computers do data. Let artists do Art.
If an artist can spend 80% more of their time creating art, rather than wrangling data and doing the mundane, how much more art do you think they could create? How many more design iterations can they produce?
That’s what their expertise is. That’s what they should be doing.
Automation of the mundane frees them up to do more art.
If you want more designs, iterations, options, stop asking your design team to wrangle data. Let automated systems do that for them.
How can Automation help your process?
If you would like to talk about your process and find out how your bottlenecks can be opened up through automation, let’s chat!
I love talking in person with individuals at companies who are trying to figure out their 3D/Ai pipelines. If you would like to discuss what you are doing with your product pipeline, and would like to know more about how you can make it more powerful, efficient, faster, and more flexible, set up a quick discovery call with me. I look forward to meeting with you!
About this newsletter: Every week, I share some insights into 3D content creation pipelines - tools, processes, success stories, pipeline mistakes, and more. It’s meant to help those involved in 3D product creation, from artists to managers and leadership, understand what is happening in their world, and how to use the latest technologies to create higher quality with greater efficiency, saving time and money.
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