A conversation with Holger Schmidt, Director of Client Services at 4D Pipeline, and Safir Bellali, Strategic Advisor in DPC and Digital Innovation, 3DRC Education Chair, and design faculty at Art Center and USC
Something unusual is happening in design classrooms right now. Students who have never touched traditional 3D software are creating work that would have taken seasoned professionals weeks just a few years ago. Many of them are not learning the old tools first. They might not learn them at all.
We sat down with Safir Bellali and Holger Schmidt to find out why. Safir Bellali spent 25 years leading digital innovation at Vans and VF Corporation (Timberland, The North Face, Dickies). He has consulted with LVMH and Epic Games, chairs the 3DRC Education Committee, and teaches AI-powered design at Art Center and USC's Iovine and Young Academy. Holger Schmidt led 3D transformation at Adidas for years. He now runs client services at 4D Pipeline, working with fashion, automotive, and consumer products brands navigating AI-augmented workflows.
The conversation quickly moved past the usual enterprise transformation talking points into territory that rarely gets discussed: what happens when the next generation of designers never learned the old way? And if those designers don't need the same skills, do companies need the same roles?
Design used to require mastering complex software before you could express an idea. That's changing.
Derek Cicero: Safir, you're teaching design students who will enter the workforce in two years. Are they learning the same tools their managers learned? Or is something fundamentally different happening?
Safir Bellali: I just started teaching this class at Art Center which focuses on AI-powered creative workflows. We have students from transportation design, product design, spatial design, interaction design.
We had a conversation last week about what makes design successful, and we identified three components.
You need to have an idea, obviously. The idea is at the core, the concept, coming up with something different and innovative.
But until not too long ago, a lot of people who had great ideas did not have the skills or the tools to translate those ideas and communicate those ideas. Very often these ideas would be stuck in someone's mind or in someone's notebook.
So the ability to visualize your ideas, and then finally the ability to tell a story. Storytelling is becoming an incredibly powerful component of the design process. It allows you to go from the idea to something that you can share, you can present, you can visualize, and your ability to tell a powerful story around all that is ultimately what's going to sell, either to investors or to customers or anyone in between.
Right now with the advent of AI and the development of 3D tools, we're shifting from very complex DCC [digital content creation] software (such as 3ds Max / Maya / Blender) that required several months if not years of training to master them, to the availability of tools and platforms that are very intuitive. I'm thinking about platforms like Twinmotion or Metahuman. Those are tools that in the past required a lot of technical knowledge. Now everyone can have access to them.
The new bottleneck isn't learning the tools. It's learning to ask the right questions.
Safir: Layer onto that AI, where now you have access to an incredible pool of knowledge that you can just tap into, provided you ask the right questions.
And the shift here is a shift towards clarity. It's not enough to have an idea. In order to leverage these new AI platforms, you have to be able to ask the right questions.
The students are picking up on this. They're spending a lot more time developing the clarity about what it is that they're trying to do, because without that, you'll go in a thousand different directions and you end up with random combinations - elephants with wings on toast.
Holger Schmidt: I think that's what we're seeing across the industry too. Just last year, at every PI conference AI was part of every discussion. Yet in these discussions we're forgetting a little bit that the actual challenge is not so much the technology.
Technology is there to help. It's tools. It's things that make people be more creative, work more efficiently. But the actual challenges you want to solve are the same. You want to be able to envision your products. You want to be creative. You want to influence what your customers think. You want to go faster to market. All these things don't go away.
The interesting thing is that right now, at least what we see, is that AI starts solving problems that 3D cannot or could not solve. The creative part of the process is benefiting the most right now from AI because it gives designers a tool to gather data, to combine data, to form and shape their thoughts into images, into text, into a new kind of creative approach.
Now, and possibly in some shape or form in the future there is 3D and there is AI and they both will coexist along the process. There will be no replacement with one or the other. They just will, as every technology over the last 20 or 30 years, fuse together and create something new.
A ten-year-old sits with an iPad for three hours, iterating on character designs for a book she's writing. This is the new creative process.
Derek: That makes sense at the enterprise level. But what does this actually look like on the ground? Holger, you mentioned you're seeing this shift firsthand.
Holger: My daughter is ten years old. She and her friends are writing their own book currently. They handle the craftsmanship part and they don't use AI to write anything. It's their own story. But all the pictures, everything that they use to envision what the people in the book look like, they use AI.
It's fascinating to see her sitting in front of an iPad for two, three hours sometimes, typing and going to ChatGPT or Gemini. She's experiencing what Safir mentioned earlier. They describe what they want. They narrow it down. They go very precise. Then they reiterate.
The barrier from clicking buttons, drawing lines, being super precise goes over to having a conversation. That's a big, big change. Suddenly there are not so many restrictions anymore. The restrictions will become physical. The digital restrictions, the restriction of knowledge, they will just fade away.
Safir: We might see a lot more designers coming out of the woodwork. People who up until now did not have an outlet for their ideas.
Derek: Which is interesting because it flips the traditional dynamic. Usually, building something technical required mastering specific tools and languages first. Now, people who think in terms of outcomes and can articulate their vision clearly, but who may lack that traditional technical training, suddenly have the power to build things they couldn't before.
Safir: If you're an interaction design student with no experience in coding, you now have the ability to build MVPs, to build prototypes that work really well, that do not require any technical knowledge. Obviously at a certain point you're going to need someone who has a background in coding and programming to scale that. But you can get to a prototype level very easily.
What counts now more than ever is the idea and the intent.
Derek: So in a way you're saying this raises questions about job descriptions and who gets hired. These students never learned the old way. They don't think in terms of "I need a 3D person and a 2D person and a coder," they just think about what they're trying to make. We'll come back to what that means for how companies structure roles.
Students expect their work to move seamlessly between applications. The industry spent a decade learning that's not how things work.
Derek: Safir, students today have access to things like Blender and more open-source products. But the industry spent a decade struggling with interoperability issues, file formats that don't talk to each other, materials that look different in every application. Do students even know that pain point exists? Or are they just expecting things to work?
Safir: In an educational design project, the number of handoffs are fairly limited, so the implications are not the same as in an industrial setting. I've introduced students who had never touched any 3D software at all to this idea of spatializing your storytelling, spatializing your visualization, adopting a human-centered design approach with avatars, metahumans.
Tools like Blender are great because they're free. You can do a lot with that. They're still fairly complicated. You're not going to get into Blender and be able to build things right away. But you have tools like Gravity Sketch, which is a great on-ramp into 3D because it's very intuitive. It's fun. Obviously the hardware requirements create a hurdle to adoption. But once you go beyond that, the students who discover what they can do with 3D and want to start deploying their assets to materialization platforms, bringing their assets into real-time platforms, the process of having to export and making sure that whatever you created is read the right way is fairly time-consuming and it can be very painful.
They don't know how things were, but they do know how they would like for things to be. A process that's fairly seamless that gives you the ability to export something into a different platform and making sure that whatever I built, the materials that I applied, they show up the way they should. It's not a lot to ask.
After decades of waiting, the 3D industry finally has standards that work. Students are about to inherit a very different landscape.
Derek: That's exactly the interoperability problem the industry has been trying to solve for years. Holger, when it comes to OpenUSD and platforms like NVIDIA Omniverse, what's actually working today versus what's still aspirational?
Holger: When we start in the real time world, glTF is probably the most used standard right now in the 3D space and it's been really successful because everywhere you go, whenever you want to do real time 3D, it's glTF. That's great. It has a foundational physically plausible model, a PBR material model, the meshes, everything. But it's built with a focus on real time.
If you want to go into the creation domain, the movie industry, everything that is around special effects and similar, standards like USD specifically, MaterialX, Open PBR are, I would say, common now if not the standard. All common tools now can read, write, operate on top of USDs and that is really helpful.
I cannot tell you for how many years, actually decades, we've been waiting for a material standard that just allows users to get similar results between different vendors and DCCs. And that problem, it's not 100% solved but it's close to being solved. Which is amazing because you finally can move your data from A to B and it still looks similar.
In other industries, is it fully embraced yet? No. Is it being picked up? Absolutely. Pretty much every client we talk with is asking for USD, asking us how and if it works, can we implement it, can we use it? And the answer is sometimes - it depends a little bit on your pipeline and where you stand, but typically yes, you can use it. And it will set you up with an amazing foundation.
If you pick USD nowadays, very simple, very short: you can't go wrong.
[Editor's note: We'll do a deeper dive on USD and real-time platforms later in 2026, including what the Alliance for OpenUSD means for cross-industry adoption.]
Derek: So the foundation is there. Safir, where does that leave us in terms of what's next?
Safir: Once the interface and the way we use these tools is completely rethought with the help of AI, the same way vibe coding can produce complex code, if you can now build things in 3D by just talking through the process, talking through what you want, and you can ensure that whatever you've built can be read further downstream and can be deployed in a way that maintains all its attributes, we're going to see an explosion of possibilities and of 3D content.
That is going to be, in my opinion, a little bit more intentional than just AI-generated slop. Because it takes intent. It takes work to get something done the way you want it. But the tools should not be in the way anymore. The formats should not be in the way anymore. It's just your ability to translate what you want into very clear instructions that's going to make a difference.
Next week, we continue to Part 2: The Articulation Advantage, the Interface We Haven't Built Yet, and What This Means for Design Roles
Meet Us at PI Stride USA 2026
Holger Schmidt and Tyler Worden will be at PI Stride in Portland, March 9-10, 2026. If you'd like to continue this conversation or discuss how these ideas apply to your digital product creation challenges, reach out before the event.
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