The Bubble Sofa Miniatures

Blender model for product renders

The most obvious application is the creation of highly detailed models from which product renders can be made. 

The most important details have to do with how the fabric texture is overlaid around the mesh, where the seams are located, and the tension around the seams. 

After the mesh is built up, seams are defined on the model with seams. These are edges where several pieces of fabric with different orientations come together. In reality, deformation will occur around these zones.

Then the 3D Model is "unfolded" to 2D surfaces on a photo texture using UV mapping. This allows the 3D program to know how to deform the fabric texture on curved surfaces.

Furthermore, we loaded the mesh in sculpt mode to apply the cloth filter to all seams. This allows you to sculpt unevenness and stress points on the mesh. This gives the model an analog look.

Blender3D also has the necessary material options to achieve a realistic result. For example, we used sheen to give the fabric material a matte light reflection.

Finally, we built a digital studio environment with three-point lighting. The rim light provides the necessary highlights on the legs of the elements. This way they don't fall away over the black background. The orientation of the front light determines how curves come out on the final render.

DAE model for architecture programs

For the collaboration between E21 and other architects to go as smoothly as possible, the 3D models must be able to be loaded quickly into 3D Architecture programs such as Sketchup. 

DAE is the best file format because you can also use it to add materials, textures and subdivisions. The disadvantage, however, is that the above properties are much more limited than with .blend files. You can only use photo textures as material and a lot of shading properties such as sheen disappear.

In other words, it was necessary to build up new materials specifically for the DAE versions. We solved the loss of the sheen property by mimicking a similar effect with metallic and specular.

To keep the files under 7MB, we disabled all details of the cloth filter.

STL for 3D Printing

The last but most important application was to produce a 3D Model optimized for 3D Printing. Due to the large print run, we had to take into account that the complexity of the model would not increase the fail rate of the production.

Initially, the intention was to apply the fabric texture to the 3D printed model as well. This woven texture should be incorporated into the topology of the model. 

Because fabric fibers have very fine details, they must be applied to a model with a huge number of polygons. Using the displacement modifier, we pass all the details along with the mesh. This is necessary since slicer programs cannot read material or texture. 

It soon became clear that the results were not consistent across the different modules. Therefore, we decided to drop them and shift our focus to producing the modules as efficiently as possible. 

The final adjustment was to apply branding and numbering to each element. Cylindrical cutouts indicate the placement of the various legs.

User Experience

Thanks to the 3D printed miniatures, E21 customers can quickly test out new compositions without moving the modules. Numbering makes it easy for customers to specify which modules they want to reorder.