Current Technology and Industry Challenges
CAD applications in apparel/fashion/flexible goods design struggle to find the right compromise between simplicity in operation on one hand and the need to incorporate advanced functionality to solve complicated tasks in the industry.
In this continuous challenge, editing the folds on apparel products is one of the tough things to solve in an elegant yet performant way. Gemini CAD Systems was one of the pioneers in treating folds as reversible entities, allowing the user to handle the pattern in folded-position and automatically unfolding the pattern to obtain the cutting shape. Despite this important advantage compared to competitor products, in all previous versions it was quite difficult to handle multiple or overlapped folds and the interaction was not intuitive.
Our Breakthrough
Gemini Pattern Designer X17 incorporates a new functionality called Folds Editor, capable to handle folds creation, alteration and simulation in a very intuitive way, using a 3D visualization tool.
The solution was to copy the natural process of folding, to separate this process into discrete alternating steps (one to the left, one to the right, etc.) and to add a simple information such as folding direction (fold upwards or downwards) and the width of each step.
How It Works?
Once the folding process was divided into these simple discrete steps, creating or representing a complex fold remained to be just a matter of filling lines into a table. Multiple folds are just more rows in the table. Copying a fold or multiplying one fold to obtain other 50 similar folds to create a folded skirt is a matter of copying and adding rows into the table.
On top of this simple and easy to use logical structure, Gemini added a 3D viewer, so all the steps in the fold are easily observed during editing. An automatic supervisor mark in real time any step which is invalid (because of its width or direction) and guides the user how to fix it.
Creating and managing folds, even the most complicated multiple folds with intricate folding directions, is now an easy and intuitive task.
Folds from one model can be easily copied and applied in another model or another pattern.
In addition, Gemini Pattern Designer also offers now libraries of pre-edited folds ready to be applied in most common situations.
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