Saddles International

I joined Saddles International in June 2016 as R&D and Design Head. Full-time work on the Saddles stack wound down around 2023; Morpheus+ and jewellery configurators came after, as separate product lines. The job at Saddles was never one discipline: proprietary visualization for aviation and automotive interiors, a team to train on custom Houdini tools, and a growing stack of web apps so clients could review designs without sitting in our office.

The through-line is the same across years: make the design visible early, make the tool fast enough to iterate in the room, and keep a path from Houdini to whatever the client actually opens in a browser.

This post is the umbrella case study. Deeper dives on individual pillars (aviation OEM work, the Designer stack, Mocker, client dashboards) will follow as separate write-ups.

Timeline

Archived Houdini digital assets in Dropbox date from May 2018; the earliest showreel on disk is from March 2019. Work before 2018 used the same pipeline but lives outside that archive. By March 2021 our internal DTRnR(Disaster Tolerance, Recovery, and Resilience.) doc listed a four-person software team shipping Designer, API, PO, and TyreStickerz in parallel.

Era	Approx. dates	What shipped	Representative tooling
Core seat geometry	2016–2019	Aviation and automotive OEM visualization; generic client naming in early reels	Cutter, Gathering, MainCuts, Padder, Threading, AO passes
Designer + custom formats	2020	Flagship upholstery editor; SDM/SDX mesh export; TyreStickerz asset pipeline	QuiltExporter, SDM Exporter, sticker_mesh, curvature colors
Components + web export	2021	Stitching and perforation HDAs; bridge from Houdini to web configurators	Designer Component, Saddles_stitching, SDX Configurator Exporter
Quilter, Mocker, baked normals	2022	Electron mockups; pattern tools; baked-diffuse prep for web	quilter_mocker, HOGl_Normals, Substance Painter prep
Studio Designer + Ford baker	2023	Browser Designer; ford.saddles.studio baked-IBL POC	Design_Baker, leather_material, Studio_Design_Builder

The Houdini backbone

Before any web configurator existed, the work was seat geometry and material fidelity inside Houdini. Cutting, gathering, padding, and thread paths were digital assets the viz team could reuse across OEM programs. Early reels in the video section below are from that period: macro leather studies, then full bench and bolster layouts for client sign-off.

Aviation and automotive programs ran on the same toolchain; I keep early client references generic in those 2016–2018 clips even when later work names Tata, Mahindra, Kia, and others explicitly.

Designer and custom formats

Designer was the flagship: a custom mesh format (saddles_designer_model / SDX) for fast load, with GLB still used for textured parts, canvas-driven designs, stitch length and padding controls, and perforations tied to real-world values. A full backend handled materials, colors, designs, and multi-tier client accounts with model whitelisting.

The Vercel deployment below is one branch of a long-lived monorepo; it can be slow or unstable depending on which build is live.

The 2019 Saddles presentation and 2020 TyreStickerz clips in the timeline show how the same export path fed marketing reels and the HotTracks tyre-sidewall editor (Firebase-backed designs, embeddable transparent viewport). TyreStickerz no longer has a working public deploy; the screen recording is the reference.

Ford baked-lighting POC

The ford.saddles.studio experiment was my most ambitious shading pass: a 9×9 grid of diffuse maps baked at normal deviations from −60° to +60°, so the shader could swap diffuse response without rebaking the whole seat. Fixed cameras because most reviewers do not orbit 3D scenes. The UX is rough (pick a design, then click the seat region) and the EXR stack is slow; the embed below may stall on first load.

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Please note that you have to select the design that you want on the right pannel and then select the part of the car where you want it applied.

Lineage in the HDA archive: Design_Baker, HOGl_Normals, and leather material import tools from 2023.

Fast web iteration

Once Houdini could export variations quickly, the web layer became a race to deploy:

Embeddable player pattern (Morpheus+)

The ring configurator at Morpheus+ grew out of the same habit: keep the 3D viewer a dumb iframe, push product logic to the host. That work has its own case study — Ring Configurator — including the postMessage API and a live Unsaid 3D product page. Car and material demos above are public cousins of the pattern; different domains, same separation of concerns.

Client delivery stack

From the March 2021 DTRnR snapshot, these were the production-facing services (roles as listed then):

As of this writing, ford, car, material, Designer Vercel, destiny, jnp, and next.saddles.studio still respond. The saddlesindia.studio, API, PO, beta, and Heroku TyreStickerz hosts do not; separate posts will cover screenshots and architecture for those apps.

Team at DTRnR(Disaster Tolerance, Recovery, and Resilience.) time: myself (software PM, VFX sup, Django, React); Bhaskar D (3D generalist, compositor, Designer/TyreStickerz export); Hemanth Kumar (UI/UX, React/Next, Firebase).

Side tools and experiments

Mocker (2022) was an Electron app for live quilt and material swaps on archived interior scenes; the quilter_mocker HDAs fed it. JNP was a separate education kiosk POC (custom gravity visualization, low CPU target); the WebGL demo at demo-jnp.vercel.app still runs (p = perf monitor, s = spacetime grid). next.saddles.studio is Hemanth’s scroll-based marketing experiment, still live:

Internal scaffolding (maker / makerCore CLI, empty dashboard/UI git placeholders) never shipped as user-facing demos; one paragraph is enough.

Timeline on video

The clips below are in chronological order, from 2018 material studies through 2024 web configurators. Each file is watermarked https://magaji.dev (centered on every clip) at encode time.

What shipped vs what stayed POC

Many items in the video timeline were review tools, not products. Ford’s baked-lighting configurator and the early Saddles Configurator screen recording are honest POCs. Fiat, Camry, Juke, and Range Rover reels were client-facing visualization. Mocker and TyreStickerz sat between: real workflows, limited distribution.

Separate posts will unpack the Houdini digital-asset library (seat cutting, quilting, SDX export, Design Baker), the Django/Wagtail PO stack, and the Firebase project-tracking portal. For now, the videos and live embeds above are the map.