USDZ Export in Substance Painter: Creating AR-Ready Content with Shopify

Can you tell us more about Shopify AR?

At Shopify, we’re committed to unlocking the incredible business potential of making augmented reality more accessible for small businesses.

Shopify AR provides an accessible toolkit for businesses to create their own AR experiences through our services marketplace of 3D modeling partners, the 3D Warehouse App to store your models, and an easy way to add AR Quick Look support to your store.

How do you think AR is impacting online shopping experiences?

AR technology helps merchants create better online shopping experiences by increasing customer confidence in the products they see online. When shoppers are able to see products in the context of their own homes and inspect them from all angles, zooming in and out on details, it gives them a much better sense of what they’re buying. AR is helping us bridge the online and offline shopping experiences by assuaging any worries that develop when shopping online.

Moreover, with Shopify AR’s Quick Look support, these experiences are available to hundreds of millions of people using mobile devices.

How does Substance improve the development of AR shopping experiences?

Shopify’s Services Marketplace enables merchants to connect with partners to create extremely realistic 3D models of their products. Substance has improved the time it takes for a partner to create previews, renders and AR-ready 3D models to be tested on a merchant’s online store.

Tell us more about the USDZ export in Substance Painter. How does it speed up your workflow compared to before?

With the USDZ export feature, Substance has helped optimize Shopify’s modeling workflow, saving us countless hours so that we can spend more time focusing on the problems that really matter to our merchants.

Previously, a 3D modeler would have to use multiple programs to paint and preview a 3D product. Combined with the added friction of needing to use the command line to export a USDZ file, this meant for a very clunky creation process. By working with Substance to identify pain points partners and merchants currently face with 3D model development, the USDZ export feature was created and is now a one-click process. Partners and merchants not only have the option to preview a USDZ file and upload it straight to the 3D warehouse, but USDZ export also optimizes the 3D model (e.g., textures) for mobile AR viewing.

Could you tell us more about the texturing workflow on the Horne desktop lamp, showcasing the USDZ export in Substance Painter?

The Horne desktop lamp is a perfect example of how Substance Painter helped decrease the overall time for development. Three products with 50 variants needed to be painted and created into USDZ files to be uploaded to a merchant’s store. With Substance, Shopify was able to create a reusable material that took in a color value to exactly match a product’s look. Each variant was then tested in AR for details and color accuracy. This workflow helped increase shopper confidence when making a purchase that they previewed in AR.

Tell us more about the work on the Pure Cycles bike.

Pure Cycles is a well known and trusted brand. When it came to creating their commuter bike, Shopify really needed to focus on all of the little intricate pieces that made them so popular.

The process starts with a list of dimensions that then correlate to different angled photos of the product. Pure Cycles provided high-quality photos that allowed for a level of detail and precision down to the millimeter. With all of these dimensions, the product then gets 3D modeled in Maya and saved out in a format that can be painted. Using Substance Painter, each piece could then be isolated and painted individually to make for an overall more realistic 3D product. The Pure Cycles bike wasn’t only used to preview in AR. 3D renders were also generated from the same asset and used in marketing collateral to show off the feature.

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