‍The challenge of 3D assets in immersive ecommerce

Immersive 3D ecommerce has the potential to revolutionize online shopping. Research shows that immersive experiences can lead to increased brand and product engagement, higher conversion rates, and fewer returns. When buyers interact with 3D assets they spend more time with them, which closes the experience gap and improves buying confidence.

While that no doubt sounds like a great deal to online sellers, the lack of 3D assets remains the elephant in the room of this promise of effective sales. If you’re not a company that typically deals in 3D assets or readily has AutoCAD files for all your products at your disposal, the prospect of generating 3D assets for your entire product catalog can be daunting.

Even if you want to focus on a few key items there are costs and time required for traditional 3D modelling. Related to this first point, a certain level of technical expertise is necessary to create these 3D assets. And a final point, a lot of companies have already put a lot of time and resources into building out their 2D product catalogs.

Businesses, therefore, need a way to quickly and easily generate 3D assets cost effectively–and at scale–if they want to truly benefit from all that immersive 3D has to offer.

Shopify integration

Napster 3D Studio is a powerful, user-friendly platform for creating immersive environments. Its native Shopify integration makes it a convenient and accessible option for small and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of immersive technology without requiring coding experience.

Fortunately, Shopify supports 3D assets, so if you already have 3D assets in your Shopify store, 3D Studio will pull those in when you connect your store. When you set up your immersive storefront, 3D Studio will automatically populate the displays so you can see how things will look. The setup process lets you easily replace the default items with anything else in your product catalog.

Seamless 3D asset generation in Napster 3D Studio

Of course, not everyone has 3D assets in their Shopify store. That’s what we’re trying to address here. The setup process in 3D Studio now includes a process that enables you to generate 3D assets from product images in your Shopify store. New accounts get 20 free 3D generations to start. At the core of this process is an AI engine that takes static, 2D images and renders them as 3D assets. 

Full disclosure: the current AI engine we’re using can struggle with text and logos. We’re continuing to develop this feature to include additional rendering engines to deliver more accurate and consistent results.

How it works

We’re going to go ahead and assume you already connected your Shopify store to your 3D Studio account. If you haven’t, check out this post that describes the different ways to make this connection. 

1. Access the Setup Wizard: Log into Napster 3D Studio and create a new 3D Studio project or scene. This will open up the Setup Wizard.
2. Select your template: Choose the immersive storefront template you wish to use and the external environment where you want your store to reside.
3. Connect your Shopify store: We’re assuming you’ve already connected your store, so you can click through the prompts.
4. Review product displays: 3D Studio will automatically populate display items from your Shopify catalog into the template.
5. Change display items (optional): Click on any display item to change it to another product from your Shopify catalog.
6. Generate a 3D asset: You have a couple of options to start the 3D asset generation process. 

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• Click ‘Create 3D model’ in the product picker on the left.

• Or click the ‘Convert to 3D’ tab in the modal on the right.

• The ‘Convert to 3D’ tab shows all the available images for that Shopify product.

• Select up to 5 high-quality images that best represent the product from different angles. Click the ‘Convert to 3D’ button to start the 3D generation process.

7. Review and refine: Once generated, the 3D asset will appear with the other assets for that product. Review it within the Studio environment. You can regenerate the item if you’re not satisfied with the final output. Try selecting different source images for different results.

7. When you’re satisfied with your 3D asset, choose it as the display asset for that product.

• Tips for best results: 
  
  • Make sure that you have high quality images of your items in your Shopify store. 
  • You want images that show your product from a variety of angles. 
  • Be patient. Sometimes it can take a couple of minutes to generate a 3D asset. While that can be frustrating, remember that it’s a lot faster and more cost-effective than creating these assets from scratch.

3D assets. Simplified.

This new feature is a major step forward when it comes to providing broad access to immersive 3D environments. By reducing the time and effort needed to create 3D assets, 3D Studio enables businesses to quickly build out their immersive product catalogs.

Armed with high quality, 3D assets businesses can create more immersive and engaging shopping journeys, improve customer understanding through product visualization, and increase customer confidence in purchases.

Compared to the cost of commissioning 3D assets from scratch, this 3D Studio process provides significant cost savings, especially at scale. This makes immersive ecommerce accessible to SMB, not just the major players with huge development budgets.

As the shift away from 2D content accelerates, building out a 3D asset library positions businesses for the future of retail. Because 3D Studio spaces are compatible across a broad range of devices, users give their business and products an advantage as new immersive technologies and applications hit the market. 

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So go ahead. Explore Napster 3D Studio and its 3D asset generator to start transforming your ecommerce business today.

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