How with the help of design thinking one can overcome his/her problem in any field. Let’s discussed with real life example.
Challenge
I am leading a creative team which supports Pre-Sales department. My team’s responsibilities include creating digital and multimedia assets production for Pre-Sales department. Our work includes all kind of creative stuffs needed to boost sales of our company products; it includes some technically challenging solutions. One of the project on which we were working was technically and creatively challenging, it’s an interactive 3d models of our company’s product. Team was divided into different geographical areas such as India and USA. We were developing 3D models in India and need to show (cross check) it to our manager and product technical managers, to know whether 3d model is technically fine or not? But problem was uploading this complete 3d model on the internet as models were very heavy in file size due to rendering with lights, animation and other settings. This complete process just to show one model needs 2 days of time. And it’s just a single model, we had lots of models in our project. And in case of feedback’s, again same 2 days(approx..). My major concern is how do I reduce this time frame and speedup this process.
Selection:
First, we need to find out that it’s a problem. Second, we should know that it needs to be solved. So, I focused on problem, started searching and brainstorming about ideas to solve this issue and speed up my work. I than zeroed on a unique plugin which we could use inside 3ds MAX software (3d model making software). Flare3d is a platform for creating interactive 3D content for web and mobile devices. With a powerful Stage3D rendering engine and an intuitive IDE. They also provide a plug-in, which one can install into 3ds MAX (3d software) and directly generate SWF (file one can play on browser) as output.
Application:
I just use this plugin i.e. Flare3d in 3d (3ds MAX) software, and interestingly it was free. As described above, our previous process was export 3d models into different 3d files where lights and another setup was done and from this final file, we export our video as MP4(video format). As due to light, animation and other effects final video output size was very high and transferring this on email/uploading was again a task. Another drawback was that this was just a video file and not an interactive file, so viewer can’t rotate, zoom etc. for proper checking.
Now with this new plugin i.e. Flare 3d, we now easily export a SWF file (Adobe Flash player format) directly from 3ds MAX software with just a click. This SWF we can directly run in browser (with some other files as a package) and its interactive too. Now any person who have this package will rotate, zoom, move these models. This plugin export video with automatic lighting which saved our lighting setup time as well. Interestingly. Final file size is very small and can be transferred on email too. This reduced production time from 2 days into 2 min. Believe me just 2 min….
Insight and Approach:
After this incidence I got to know the importance of spotting an issue or problem and then start finding solutions. Due to this problem we get to know about this plugin and find out solution out of this. People know this software for interactive development purpose, but here we had a different problem, which we solved with this Plugin in our own style. It reduced our production time from 2 days to 2 min. which was very impressive. Final file size was so less that we send files on emails. It was very useful for the receiving person also as they can see this file interactively (rotate, zoom, move etc.) that too without spending a penny.