Digital Watchmaking: Advanced Real-Time 3D Configurators for Luxury

At Unreal Feast 2025, our CTO Bojan Andrejek delivered a 43-minute deep dive into the evolution of real-time 3D configurators for the luxury watch industry. The talk traced our journey from a first prototype to a production-grade framework — and the hard lessons learned along the way.

The story begins with a fundamental question: what makes a great configurator? Three pillars emerged — exploration (seeing the product from every angle in real time), personalization (choosing colors, materials, engravings), and confidence (buying with certainty knowing exactly what you'll receive). A digital configurator isn't a catalogue of what everyone can have; it's a tool for designing something uniquely yours.

Version zero was built for Watches & Wonders 2024 under a 4-month deadline. We used Unreal Engine's built-in Variant Manager, connected it to Shopify and a custom CRM backend, and manually ported everything to WebGL via PlayCanvas. It worked — but maintaining the full stack was brutal. Every change had to be replicated across Unreal, the web version, and the store. UI wasn't flexible, materials were baked too simply, and backend changes were nearly impossible to sync. The client eventually dropped the Unreal version entirely and continued with WebGL only.

That failure drove the redesign. Version one introduced three principles: data-driven design (options controlled by structured data assets, not hardcoded logic), a procedural approach (UI and watches generated dynamically from data), and automation (rendering, PDFs, and workflows running on autopilot). We decoupled the UI entirely — building it in React and connecting to Unreal via Socket.IO, enabling multi-station synchronized control where a salesperson's tablet controls the showroom display in real time.

The materials system deserved its own chapter. Luxury watches demand flawless visual fidelity — correct reflections on 18-carat gold, proper translucency on sapphire crystals, physically accurate shadows at every angle. We developed a complex master material system with projections, layered finishes, blends, and dynamic color functions. The architecture split into two servers: a Real-Time 3D Server running Unreal with custom plugins, and a Web Stack Server handling the backend, admin panel, and frontend — all connected via Socket.IO and REST APIs.

But V1 still had problems. Data was locked inside Unreal, authoring was slow, there was no clean split between editing and runtime, and small changes required full rebuilds. We were building a product, but we needed a framework.

Version two represents that fundamental shift. Four changes defined it: moving core logic from Blueprints to C++ for performance and stability; shifting data ownership entirely to the backend (Unreal just syncs); building a lightweight universal runtime that's patchable and future-proof; and supporting multiple platforms — PC, WebGL, Pixel Streaming, and mobile.

The results were dramatic. Setup time for configurable objects dropped by 65%. Flexibility increased by 95%, allowing non-technical staff to manage configurations, pricing, and rules without touching Unreal. The system became fully patchable with version control — no downtime, multiple hotfixes per day. The Smart Materials System reduced variant channel creation from 2 hours to 3 minutes.

The talk closed with a vision beyond watches. The same framework applies to car configurators, furniture, real estate, education, content generation, and mobile — anywhere personalization matters. As Bojan put it: 'Configurators will become the infrastructure of personalization.'