Unreal Engine for Fashion: Real Brands, Real Projects, and a CLO3D-to-Real-Time Pipeline
- AVG Guild
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Fashion moves fast. Deadlines shift, creative direction evolves, and a single collection can spawn endless variations for campaigns, socials, and e-commerce. That’s why Unreal Engine for fashion is gaining serious momentum: it gives artists and brands a real-time pipeline for photoreal visuals, interactive experiences, and rapid iteration—without waiting on traditional offline renders for every change.
Below are real-world examples of fashion using Unreal, plus where CLO3D fits when you’re building garments that need to look great in motion and up close.
Real-World Examples Using Unreal in Fashion
Balenciaga x Fortnite (interactive digital fashion at massive scale)
Balenciaga created digital outfits and in-world experiences for Fortnite, bringing luxury fashion into a real-time interactive environment. This is one of the clearest mainstream examples of fashion operating inside an engine-driven world—where garments have to read well under dynamic lighting, unpredictable camera angles, and constant motion.
Why it matters: it proved fashion can be designed not just to be seen, but to be played.
Gary James McQueen’s digital fashion show (runway storytelling without physical limits)
Designer Gary James McQueen presented a digital fashion show built with Unreal Engine, using the engine’s strengths to control environment, lighting, and camera choreography like a cinematic production.
Why it matters: Unreal makes the runway a creative canvas—locations, set pieces, and transitions can be as stylized or surreal as the collection itself.
The Fabricant and fashion-focused Unreal learning content (a growing ecosystem)
Digital fashion studios like The Fabricant have helped push real-time fashion workflows forward, and the broader Unreal ecosystem now includes learning content aimed directly at fashion creators.
Why it matters: this isn’t just a one-off trend; it’s becoming a repeatable production approach with community knowledge behind it.
Epic “Unreal Futures” and luxury fashion visualization (fashion as a real-time experience)
Epic’s “Unreal Futures” content has highlighted interactive fashion experiences featuring luxury garments—showing how brands can move beyond static media into immersive storytelling.
Why it matters: Unreal isn’t only for the final render. It’s increasingly used as the “experience layer” for marketing, events, and interactive retail concepts.
Where CLO3D Fits in the Unreal Engine for Fashion Workflow
If Unreal is the stage, CLO3D is often where the garment becomes real.
A common production flow looks like this:
Design + simulate in CLO3D
You build garments from patterns, iterate on fit, and dial in drape. CLO’s simulation is a huge time-saver for getting believable cloth behavior early.
Export with real-time in mind.
Clean meshes, manageable poly counts, and good texture sets matter. Even “perfect” garments can fall apart visually in real-time if the geometry or materials aren’t optimized.
Look-dev and final output in Unreal.
This is where you get premium lighting, virtual cameras, environments, and fast iteration. Need five lighting moods and three colorways? Unreal makes that a practical request instead of a painful one.
The quality trifecta that sells fashion in real-time
Whether you’re doing a digital runway clip, an interactive lookbook, or a product visualization, the “this looks expensive” moment usually comes from:
Materials: fabric weave detail, roughness control, specular response, micro normals
Lighting: soft key lights, controlled highlights, clean rim separation
Motion: subtle cloth movement + camera language that flatters the silhouette
That’s why Unreal Engine for fashion pairs so well with CLO3D: CLO handles the garment logic and drape; Unreal handles the cinematic polish and real-time flexibility.
Why This Matters for AVG Artists in Animation, VFX, and Games
If you’re already in animation, VFX, or games, fashion is a powerful crossover lane. It demands the same core skills—materials, lighting, composition, simulation sense—but applies them to brand-driven storytelling and product-level detail. Learning a CLO3D-to-Unreal workflow can open doors to branded content, immersive experiences, virtual production, and interactive retail concepts.
New AVG Sponsor Batship Studio
Batship Studio is Miami's first Interactive Art, Digital Fashion and Games Epic Games Unreal Authorized Training Center, founded by Art Director and Epic Games Authorized Instructor Valentina Echeverry. With AAA production experience including working with studios like SEGA, Barbie, Paramount and more, Batship Studio brings industry level real-time technology training to South Florida's creative community through hands-on workshops in Unreal Engine, interactive art, digital fashion, and game development.
As a Knight Foundation grant recipient, Batship Studio is committed to making cutting edge creative technology accessible to students, artists, and professionals across Miami.
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