Pratt DAHRC and CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. company have completed the first round of research collaboration effort successfully.
CLO3D is a virtual garment draping software produced by CLO Virtual Fashion Inc., which offers impressive digital visualization and simulation of how a garment would look and behave if constructed in real life. It offers 80% – 90% range of accuracy in simulating the draping, stretching, stiffness, inflation and other behavioral characteristics of a variety of fashion and garment materials. With rapid ability to simulate draping of soft garment materials and easy-to-use software interface, CLO3D offers attractive characteristics for creative individuals and organizations who create and produce any product which are made of soft materials such as fabric and leather. Designers of fashion, furniture, and soft consumer products can benefit from utilizing such efficient draping simulation software.
Although CLO3D software is developed and marketed to fashion garment manufacturing companies with libraries of existing blueprint patterns of already designed garments to be simulated for marketing purposes, it was the belief of the Pratt DAHRC researchers that CLO3D offers much potential in assisting designers who would like to create entirely new design ideas and directions in exploratory manner utilizing CLO3D, achieving what was not previously possible to go where no one has gone before.
With such hope, CLO Virtual Fashion and Pratt DAHRC has joined forces to give a try at using CLO3D for design development of new spacesuits, with guidance provided by the space suit company Final Frontier Design, who produce space suits for the commercial space industry. These are actual spacesuits designed for use in outer space.
Below are some test images from the first round of the research effort.
Simulation using CLO3D on the left, and the actual built prototype on the right
Simulation using CLO3D on the left, and the actual built prototype on the right – look at the simulated wrinkles!
Pratt DAHRC researcher Virgil Calejesan’s Master’s Thesis on spacesuit design is available to read here.
More comprehensive presentation of the spacesuit design development is available here.
See the spaceman in action roaming around in NYC wearing the spacesuit designed by researcher Virgil Calejesan:
Pratt DAHRC researchers HyukJae Henry Yoo, Virgil Calejesan and Michael Schafler have together documented a detailed set of recommendations and wish lists for the CLO3D software. It is exciting to see CLO3D possibly being used more as a creative tool for exploration in the future.
CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. VP of Business Development Deborah Park with Pratt DAHRC researchers Virgil Calejesan and Michael Schafler
Deborah Park, VP of Business Development at CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. tries out the outer layer arm portion of the space suit currently in development by researcher Virgil Calejesan
Pratt DAHRC acknowledges immense thankfulness to CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. and the fantastic team at the Final Frontier Design for the provision and sharing of technology and expert knowledge, without which this research would not have been possible. We look forward to the future collaborations.
June 2014
HyukJae Henry Yoo
