v1.2.1
VStitcher is a leader in 3D fashion design, helping designers model their garments via a wide range of features including photorealistic 3D renders. This focus on quality, however, can lead to large file sizes and long load times. VNTANA’s optimization process can drastically cut down on the file size of VStitcher export without sacrificing the visual quality that VStitcher produces. The VNTANA Plugin for VStitcher is designed to simplify the garment design pipeline for VNTANA Clients by handling the export process from VStitcher and automatically uploading the asset to the VNTANA Platform for optimization.
To view our guide on Browzwear exports and what settings the plugin is using, view the Browzwear Export Directions found here.
The plugin currently requires a manual installation and instructions have been provided within the download. Should you have any questions about the installation process, or usage of the plugin you can reach out to our support team at support@vntana.com.
Plugin Overview
Using the Plugin
The VNTANA VStitcher Plugin allows you to easily export your garments from VStitcher using our recommended export settings and have them directly uploaded to the VNTANA Platform for optimization. The plugin can be used either on an individual garment as a final step in your design workflow, or on a batch of garments.
Installation
A set of installation instructions are included in the download. Simply unzip the downloaded package and place the folder vntana-bw-exporter and its contents anywhere on your machine. Be aware of permissions issues before choosing a location for the plugin.
Important Note About Installation: Previous versions of the plugin required installation directly within the contents of your VStitcher installation. This is no longer the case and it is recommended that you do not install there to avoid potential permissions issues as well as that you at least remove that version of the plugin from VStitchers plugin menu. The first version that no longer has an installation requirement is version 1.1.0.
Authentication
To make use of the plugin you must first authenticate with the VNTANA Platform using either a valid Authentication Token (see below for instructions on generating this) or email and password. Once you’ve logged in once with a valid Authentication Token the plugin will attempt to log you in automatically each time the plugin is launched. There is no option for automatic authentication with an email and password.
Folder Select Page
The first screen you are brought to upon successful authentication is the Folder Select page. This is where you will indicate the Organization and Folder on the VNTANA Platform you wish the garment(s) to be uploaded to, as well as whether the plugin is to be executed on your ‘Current Project’ or a batch.
For the ‘Current Project’ option, the .bw file has to already be opened within VStitcher before the export and upload processes start. The directory that is selected is used to indicate to the plugin where .bw files are to import in the case of a batch run, or simply to indicate where to export the ‘Current Project’ if selected.
You cannot progress in the plugin until a directory is set.
Browzwear Settings
Once you’ve selected the destination on the VNTANA Platform as well as the source and output of your BW files, you can make a few decisions regarding what gets exported from VStitcher. As mentioned above, the plugin uses our recommended export settings and these are not available to change via the plugin. You can however choose to export the Avatar with the model, select the snapshot, and select the colorways.
Note: For both Snapshots and Colorways these options are only available when running the plugin on a .bw file that is currently loaded in VStitcher.
Snapshots: When running on a project loaded in VStitcher (and when ‘Current project’ is selected on the previous screen) you can select the snapshot you wish to export. A couple notes, if a snapshot doesn’t have a name the plugin will assign it the name ‘Unnamed’. To make it easier to determine which snapshot is which, the preview image is shown next to the snapshot selection box. Additionally, if you are running the plugin as a batch it will always select the most recently created snapshot, not most recently updated snapshot. This is due to what data VStitcher returns and created is the only timestamp available.
Colorways: When running on a project loaded in VStitcher (and when ‘Current Project’ is selected on the previous screen) you have a couple options for the colorways that get exported. The options are All, Custom, and Current. All will of course export all available colorways and is the only option available when running in a batch. Current will export whatever colorway the currently loaded .bw file is set to. Finally, Custom allows you to select exactly which colorways you want exported.
VNTANA Settings
The VNTANA settings refer to the same settings you can adjust when uploading an asset to a product on the VNTANA Platform. By default, our recommended settings for use with Browzwear files are populated, however should you choose to change any and land on a set of settings you feel give your assets the best outcome, you can save these as a template by pressing the ‘+’ button next to the Load Settings selection box. This selection will be populated with ‘default’ and ‘settings’ which correspond to VNTANA’s default recommended settings for Browzwear files and then the last used settings in the plugin, respectively. Note: these templates are not connected to the Presets available on the Platform.
Tags and Attributes
The final screen gives you the option of adding Tags and / or Attributes to the products created by the plugin. This is optional and is applied broadly to all products created in that run of the plugin, so if there are any garment specific Tags or Attributes these will have to be created manually on the Platform.
About Page
This page is accessed via the dropdown menu by your username. This page contains a brief FAQ regarding the plugin and how or why it produces the outcome it does. The same information is available on this page.
Plugin Operations and Possible Issues
Snapshots
Regardless of whether the plugin is being run on the current project or a batch, it determines the export by pulling the latest snapshot that was created, not latest updated. If the outcome doesn’t look the way you expect, this may be the reason and you should verify within Browzwear that the snapshot the plugin will use is correct.
Batch Process
When running the plugin on a batch of files, it is important to understand what the plugin is doing to pull the files it will process. The directory that is set gets scanned for any .bw file, but the plugin has no way of knowing whether a .bw file is ready to be exported or not, other than in cases where there is no snapshot in which case it’ll just move on and not upload it. The most likely outcome of loading unintended files is just that they will be uploaded to the Platform, but it would result in more work after having to remove these files.
The scanning process is recursive, meaning it will search all subdirectories as well. We recommend placing files that are ready to be processed in one folder to avoid issues with processing unintended assets.
Update Products
The option to update existing products instead of always creating a new product is available through the plugin. We understand the process can entail constant minor reworks as well as exploration into the best settings for your assets, and as such having the ability to push an edit through to an existing product without needing to then delete the old product while still being able to create multiple of one asset with various settings to compare is important.
VStitcher Messaging
When importing a garment into VStitcher, a pop-up message can display for a number of reasons. These cannot be handled by the plugin and if left unresolved can cause the plugin to timeout or crash. These tend to relate to garments that have been designed on multiple workstations resulting in different versions for certain components such as avatars.
Re-Installing a Plugin
VStitcher has a tendency to crash when re-installing a plugin. This isn’t an indication of an issue with the plugin, but it can cause some confusion. Generally, just reopening VStitcher shows everything is fine, the newly updated plugin can be accessed from the plugin menu. Sometimes, however, when it crashes the ‘Plugins’ option will be removed from the top navigation bar despite the plugin still being loaded. When this happens, it can require a complete restart of your computer to get that menu option back.
How the Plugin Communicates
The plugin makes use of the Python library Requests for all of it’s communications. If you are having trouble simply logging in to the plugin, there is a very high chance that security measures on your workstation are preventing the plugin from making the requests it needs to function. In order to circumvent this, your IT and Security teams will need to decide whether they are comfortable whitelisting everything the Plugin needs to function properly.
The plugin makes use of HTTP for it’s communications and will make calls to a variety of endpoints depending on your usage of the plugin.
Base URL: https://platform.vntana.com
Endpoints:
/v1/auth/login
/v1/auth/login/token
/v1/auth/refresh-token
/v1/organizations
/v1/clients/client-organizations
/v1/clients
/v1/clients/slug-availability
/v1/tags/search
/v1/tags/create
/v1/products/{productUuid}/search * (The productUuid can be different each time)
/v1/products
/v1/storage/upload/clients/products/asset/sign-url
/v1/variant-groups * (Query Parameters will be added to this: ?clientUuid=zzz&name=zzz&organizationUuid=zzz)
/v1/variant-groups/search
/v1/variant-groups/add-products * (Query Parameters will be added to this: ?productsUuids=zz,zz&uuids=zz,zz)
Additional URL
https://vntana-platform-2-development.wl.r.appspot.com/plugin-version-clo
https://vntana-platform-2-development.wl.r.appspot.com/plugin-version-bw (for the BW plugin if that will be used)
Google Signed URL
https://storage.googleapis.com *
Some endpoints pass information in the URL as query parameters and as such will not be the same every time. Additionally, the final endpoint used in the process of uploading an asset to the Platform uses a signed URL generated by Google.
Additional Resources
Authentication Token
An Authentication Token can be generated on the VNTANA Platform to allow secure authentication through the VStitcher and Clo plugins. Once used, this token will allow automatic authentication upon launching either plugin so long as the token isn’t revoked or regenerated, in which case you would simply need to login again through the plugins with a new token to resume automatic authentication.
To generate an Authentication Token, login to the VNTANA Platform and navigate to your profile settings by clicking ‘My Profile’ in the dropdown accessed via your profile picture.
From your profile settings, click on the “Authentication Key” tab, located towards the upper left of the webpage, to access the key generation screen.
The first time you visit this tab you will simply see a button labeled “Generate”, clicking this will generate the Authentication Token for your user account. You can click the copy icon on the right of the generated token to copy it to your clipboard or manually copy it.
As a security measure, you will only be able to copy the token for the first 30 seconds after it is generated. After this time you will have to regenerate a new token the same way should the need arise. Additionally, while a token is active you have the option to revoke it without generating a new one from the same screen.
Changelog
v1.1.5 – 4/11/2023
- Added the Auto Publish option to the VNTANA page of the plug-in.
- Defaults to ‘No’ indicating the products created will remain in DRAFT status. Set to ‘Yes’ to publish created products to LIVE.
v1.1.1 – 7/21/2022
- Bug Fix – Fixed a bug related to a batch process while a project was currently opened in VStitcher, causing one of the intended files in the batch to be skipped in the process.
v1.1.0 – 7/15/2022
- Improved Installation process.
- The plugin no longer requires installation within the directory of VStitcher.
- Permissions requirements are only dependent on the users choice of installation location.
- Improved Error logging and handling.
- Introduced secondary plugin from VStitcher Plugins menu called ‘Error Logs’ which will display logs found for the last use of the plugin.
- Added buttons to both the main plugin and ‘Error Logs’ plugin that will directly open the location of the log files. In the main plugin, the button to open the logs directory is located on the ‘About’ page.
- Improved control of ‘Current Project’ runs.
- When a .bw garment is loaded in VStitcher, you can now select the exact colorways you wish to export and upload.
- When a .bw garment is loaded in VStitcher, you can now select the exact Snapshot you wish to use for the export.
- Introduced Optimization Settings templates.
- You can now save, load, and delete templates for the VNTANA Optimization settings to avoid having to reconfigure for repeat setups.
- Note: These are different than the Presets made on the VNTANA Platform and are only stored locally.
- Additionally, the plugin automatically stores the VNTANA Recommended settings for Browzwear garments in the template ‘default’, as well as the last used settings by you in the template ‘settings’.
- You can now save, load, and delete templates for the VNTANA Optimization settings to avoid having to reconfigure for repeat setups.
- Updated the handling of file naming to address unexpected ‘Update Product’ behavior.
- The colorway name will always be appended to the end of a GLB that is exported, even if the .bw file only has one colorway and it is the default named ‘Colorway 1’.
- This was to avoid a situation where the user exports all / multiple colorways but has to reprocess only one colorway and wishes to just update the product that exists for it. Previously, when only a single colorway was exported it wouldn’t add the colorway name meaning in this scenario it wouldn’t have updated the Product as expected.
- Updated available VNTANA Optimization settings.
- Added the ‘Force Polygon Count’ and ‘Bake Ambient Occlusion’ settings.
- Removed the ‘Lossy/Lossless’ option and reduced range of ‘Aggression’ from 0-10 to 0-5 in accordance with changes made on the VNTANA Platform.
Compatibility:
- VStitcher 2021.3.*, 2022.*, 2023.1
- Windows, MacOS