Arahne is a software company specialized in woven textiles. One of its products, ArahDrape allows a customer to apply a fabric texture (or simulation) over a photo of an existing product. It is mainly used internally within the design office to validate ideas with the final customers, even before the fabric was manufactured. The raise of e-commerce has brought new requirements for ArahDrape. Web designers want to use it directly on the web site, to present the product in combination with various colours and fabrics, as part of the purchase process. Without ArahDrape, every product for sale on internet must be actually made and photographed in all colour and pattern variations. For many e commerce sites, this has become a bottleneck in putting a product on the market.
Arahne was lucky to partner with Attune Consulting, a company specialized in fashion ERP systems based on SAP technology. Attune has a rich portfolio of important clients, one of them is Zhejiang Baoxiniao Garment Co Ltd (002154.SZ) from Wenzhou, China. The main brand of Baoxiniao is Saint Angelo and Attune has developed its e-commerce web site. The web site uses ArahDrape server technology, in order to give the user visual feedback, while choosing a suit with different fabric, collars, pockets, shirt or tie. Customer gets a photo-realistic rendering of the final product and is able to make an informed purchase decision.
ArahDrape server works within the web server and calculates the necessary images on the fly, without any human intervention. It is very fast, it can make a 1000×1000 pixel image in less than 0.2 seconds, so the system’s response time is limited more by the internet connection than by server’s calculations.
ArahDrape project is developed on the desktop version of the software, based on a photo of a white or single colour product. User needs to define regions for texture mapping and the grid for realistic path of fabric wrinkles. Once the project has been saved, it can be used in ArahDrape server and we can apply any repeating image texture in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format, to make the rendered image. ArahDrape also supports alpha channel transparency (RGBA), so several images can be combined and blend nicely on a web site. ArahDrape can be called within the web server from the command line or as C library from
Java.