Before joining Adobe, I spent twenty years in visual effects. As Global CG Supervisor on films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I led teams across continents whose entire job was to deliver photoreal pixels at scale.
Our challenge was never just making things look real. It was coordinating thousands of digital assets, globally distributed teams, endless creative iteration, and high-stakes approvals—all while moving at production speed. The same pressure that made 3D asset review a VFX problem has quietly moved into marketing.
Now I work with enterprise organizations on a problem that looks, from the outside, completely different. But from the inside, strangely familiar. They’re building visual digital twins of their physical products to power marketing and commerce content at scale. And just like the VFX industry before it, they’re discovering that creating the assets is only part of the challenge.
The bigger challenge is operationalizing them. That’s why we’re bringing native 3D workflow support to Frame.io.
Brands are going all-in on 3D
Every brand I talk to is being asked to produce more imagery, more variants, more localized campaigns, and more channel-specific assets than ever before.
Physical photography isn’t going away, but digital twins are changing what’s economically possible. Generative AI gives you speed, but it can’t guarantee that the handbag in the render is your handbag—with your stitch count and your hardware finish.
But a 3D digital twin can.
It’s a physically accurate model of a real SKU. And once it exists, that same asset can power product detail pages, advertising, social campaigns, AR try-on, retail displays, and interactive configurators.
One asset. Potentially thousands of derivative pieces of content.
That changes the economics of content creation. You can start campaign imagery before the physical prototype is off the line. You can give a long-tail product the same quality of imagery as a hero SKU, because the marginal cost of one more render isn’t the marginal cost of one more studio day. You can localize for a market that would never have justified its own shoot.
Why 3D workflows break at scale
Here’s where it gets messy.
These 3D assets live in specialized tools like Substance 3D Stager and Painter, Maya, Blender, and CAD applications. But the people who need to approve them—brand managers, marketing leads, agency partners, regional teams—don’t work in 3D software.
They’ve never opened a USD file. And the truth is they shouldn’t need to.
So the assets get siloed. They’re emailed around as screenshots, reviewed over screen shares, and approved via comment threads that no one can find two weeks later. There’s no centralized version history, no clear approval trail, and no easy way to connect 3D production to the broader content workflow that everyone else lives in.
This is, almost exactly, the problem the VFX industry solved over many decades.
What Hollywood figured out (and enterprise organizations are just discovering)
To deliver photorealistic imagery across global productions, VFX studios had to build real infrastructure: asset versioning, review-and-approval pipelines, global collaboration systems, fidelity reviews, and pipeline automation. Not because anyone wanted extra process, but because the alternative—a thousand artists working across time zones without shared systems—was chaos.
Enterprise organizations that are building digital twin workflows are running into the same wall. The difference is that the stakeholders now extend well beyond artists and technical teams—they include marketing organizations, agencies, commerce operations, and executives who need to approve assets they can’t open.
The need for scalable workflow infrastructure has moved from Hollywood to the C-suite.
Frame.io brings native 3D asset review to every team
Frame.io now supports native 3D workflows.
That means your team can upload 3D assets directly into Frame.io and immediately see high-fidelity visuals—making 3D asset review accessible to anyone on the team, no 3D software required.
Supported 3D formats include:
Frame.io will automatically convert assets to USD, generate turntable previews, extract metadata, and place those 3D assets into the same collaborative environment where teams already manage video, photography, and creative reviews.
Comments, version history, and approvals all work the same way they do for everything else. And that part matters more than it might sound.
That’s because 3D assets shouldn’t require a separate workflow. They should slot into the one that already exists.
When a brand manager can review a digital twin the same way they review a campaign video, the barrier to adoption drops considerably.
Marketing doesn’t have to learn the hard way
At Adobe, we see Frame.io’s 3D support as part of a connected digital twin content supply chain: Substance 3D handles creation and material authoring, GenStudio enables scaled content generation and compositing, and Frame.io becomes the collaborative layer where humans review, iterate, and say, “Approved.”
The organizations that win in this next era won’t just have better 3D assets. They’ll have better systems for moving those assets through teams, campaigns, channels, and experiences.
That’s the lesson the VFX industry learned the hard way. It’s one that the marketing world doesn’t have to relearn from scratch.
