Samenvatting

This research is conducted within the company context of Grosso Moda to investigate how the accuracy of digital garment simulation of suiting styles can be improved so that the product development process can replace physical samples with digital ones to improve efficiency while reducing time and costs.
Suiting styles result particularly difficult to simulate due to the complex structure of multiple fabric layers in styles such as blazers. This research proposes to simulate custom digital fabric files based on the fabric behaviour of multiple fabrics layered on top of each other as they would be in a suiting garment. 3D technology has been present within the fashion industry for many years, but doesn’t provide the technical aspect of product development, mainly due to the focus on visual properties over accuracy of assimilating real-life. The advantages of using 3D technology in fashion mainly involve reducing the number of physical samples during the product development process, resulting in physical samples only being required for the mass production phase. Digital garments can only be as accurate as the digital fabric files used to simulate them. What current software lacks is an environment that takes into consideration all physical phenomena that affects fabric behaviour in a garment during wear. CLO3D proposes the CLO Fabric Kit 2.0 to measure weight, thickness, stretch and bend properties of real-life fabrics and input this data into the programme’s fabric emulator to simulate digital version of the physical fabric. This research investigates how this technology can be used to measure fabric behaviour of garments with multiple fabric layers, and how layering fabrics affect the properties overall. This research also investigates user experience of designers at Grosso Moda to understand the technology within the company context. Experts in the field of 3D technology in garment simulation are consulted to provide context and insight on the current state of 3D technology in fashion, what role it plays and how it can be improved to serve a purpose beyond a visual tool. Experts highlight that further integration of 3D technology in garment development is halted by a lack of universal standards for measuring and simulating fabric properties, which limits the reliability of current digital garment simulations as design tools. Weight, thickness, stretch, and bend properties are measured manually with the CLO Fabric Kit 2.0, and mechanically with the equipment of the textile laboratory. Different standards of measuring lead to inconsistent and incomparable results. The results of the CLO Fabric Kit 2.0 measurements are input into the CLO3D fabric emulator to create custom digital fabric files that reflect the physical properties of the various combinations of fabric layers of shell, linings, and interfacings, and applied to the digital garments. The comparison between the digital and physical samples of the suiting styles studied in this research reveal that the software does not reveal the difference in fabric properties between different parts of the garment with different fabric layers, and the drape properties of the digital garments do not match those of the physical ones. This research concludes that due to the complexity of fabric behaviour, physical fabric properties must continue to be measured and a analysed in order to build a system that relies on a universal standard that can be applied to all fabrics and produces reliable and accurate simulations.