Getting an Interior Design Edge with the Artec Leo

Most of us have an idea of how we want our homes to look: a cosy bedroom, a bright and welcoming lounge, perhaps a sleek and stylish kitchen where we can entertain guests. Making that idea a reality requires choosing the right furniture to fill each room, and that involves finding pieces that work well together and within the space.

Of course, the reality doesn’t always match the idea. Even after measuring every wall and painstakingly choosing a color palette, sometimes your newly bought furniture doesn’t quite look or fit how it should. A photograph in a retailer’s magazine or on its website can only give you so much information about the item.

That’s why trusted furniture retailer Rooms To Go is using 3D scanning to build a huge library of digital 3D models of its furniture, giving customers high-quality information about their potential purchases that can help them make their dream home a reality.

Painting a Picture for Customers

With over 7,500 employees and 137 stores across the country, Rooms To Go has become one of the largest furniture chains in the US since opening in 1990. Its philosophy is simple: offer customers entire rooms—complete sets of complementary furniture rather than individual items—to save them time and money.

Because of its focus on complete collections, Rooms To Go retail locations often have large displays where customers can see, touch, and experience the furniture, giving them an idea of how it would feel in their own home. However, the retailer has to use a different approach for its online sales: simply photographing the bricks-and-mortar showroom would not have the same effect.

For its website containing thousands and thousands of items, Rooms To Go uses 3D renderings—incredibly realistic images of room interiors designed by expert 3D artists—instead of staged photographs. This allows them to quickly model all sorts of different home styles without lugging heavy furniture to expensive shooting locations.

These 3D images also benefit the customer, as they provide a clear, well-lit, dimensionally accurate picture of each product in an imagined home environment. In fact, most customers won’t even realize they’re looking at a computer-generated image.

Leveraging Digitize Designs’ Furniture Scanning Expertise

While some companies create the entire image from scratch using engineering drawings or other sources, Rooms To Go wanted to ensure a perfect matchup between its physical products and their corresponding “digital twin.”

After seeing the Artec Leo demoed at an Amazon AWS expo, the 3D Visualization Department at Rooms To Go realized that a fast and reliable 3D scanner could help them create highly accurate 3D models of their furniture—way faster than a 3D artist could manage on their own. A high-end scanner like the Leo could even capture tricky surfaces like dark wood, reflective or varnished materials, and fuzzy textures like upholstery.

Rooms To Go got in touch with Digitize Designs via Artec, and our team confirmed that the Leo, with its accuracy of 0.1 mm and speed of up to 35 million points per second, would be the perfect tool for them.

One of our trained engineers then went down to meet the 3D Visualization Department at their studio in Atlanta before setting up the bundle of 3D scanners, new computers, and software.

A comprehensive two-day training session helped Rooms To Go get up and running in no time. Our engineer showed the team the ideal scanning techniques, modes, and parameters for different pieces of furniture, leveraging Digitize Designs’ experience working with other furniture companies.

Perfecting the Workflow for Even Faster Scans

Within days, Rooms To Go had a new, lightning-fast workflow for generating 3D furniture models, using the AI-powered wireless scanner and its click-to-scan function to digitize its stunning collections.

“With Leo 3D scanning, we can capture our products knowing that the size and proportions are 100% correct,” explains Juan Rodriguez, 3D Quality Control Manager at Rooms To Go. “There are times when you look at the results and think ‘it’s too big or wide.’ Our models give the exact right information on everything from outer dimensions to cushion sizing.”

Thousands of Artec Leo scans later, Rooms To Go has perfected its workflow, figuring out the best way to perform the scan and the best way to turn the scan data into a photorealistic 3D model that will help customers plan their home. In most cases, scanning an item—even something large and complex like a bed frame—takes under five minutes.

They’ve learned a few tricks along the way, too. When setting up an item for scanning, the company now sometimes flips the object upside down onto a chair or box to ensure that every tiny detail is captured by the scanner.

In terms of processing the scan data, Rooms To Go uses Artec Studio, deploying key features like the AI-assisted Autopilot for automatic processing, Smart Fusion mode for adaptive resolution, and ultra-sharp HD Mode for fine details. Then any textures that need refining can be remodeled by the team’s talented 3D artists using Autodesk 3ds Max, resulting in near-perfect fidelity to the physical object.

“We want everything that we’re modeling to replicate that photo studio image, so when you’re looking at it, you really don’t know which one is which,” says Rodriguez. “The precision we’re able to obtain from 3D scanning helps our artists abundantly, and makes sure this happens.”

New Possibilities for 3D Furniture Models

When browsing the Rooms To Go collection, you’ll now find well over 3,000 precisely scanned furniture models, showing you each item with greater detail and clarity than you’d get with a set of ordinary photographs.

But the 3D visualization team has no plans to stop there. As well as aiming to build an even bigger library of 3D models that can be viewed individually or placed neatly within their eye-catching full-room renderings, the company has discussed the prospect of offering a virtual 3D furniture placement feature to give customers an even clearer picture of their potential purchase.

“We are 1,000% going to continue scanning furniture in the hope of expanding,” says Tammy Beach, 3D Visualization Manager at Rooms To Go. “Moving forward, we do want to entertain the thought of adding more scanners to what we’re currently using. We’re not there yet, but our hope is to be there sooner rather than later. We’re literally just scratching the surface of what we can do with Artec 3D scanning.”

Retailers of all shapes and sizes can benefit from digitizing their product catalog just like Rooms To Go. Contact us today to schedule a demo and find the ideal 3D scanning solution for your business.