Re: FLASH: see product before you buy

[John Dowdell]

At 3:07 PM 8/23/99, Angeline Geronimo wrote:

>I have a project for a "tiling" company.  One thing they really wanted is to

>be able to show a picture of a kitchen/bathroom and have the visitors choose

>their own tile before they buy.  This way the visitors can see how their

>kitchen/bath would look beforehand.

>I would like to know if this can be done with flash3 (maybe flash4?) and if

>any of you have websites that did the same thing.  Also is there an

>easier/better way to do it than with flash?


Might be, but a lot depends on the project. If I were consulting on it

myself, the first questions I'd have would include:


--  There's only one main bathroom, right? This isn't some situation where

people can upload pictures of their bathroom and we'd tile them in

realtime, I suppose. I'd also guess that there isn't a range of bathrooms

to choose from. Is there only a single bathroom?


--  How many parts change? Is there only one tiling selection per bathroom?

Or can people choose different tiles for the floor, for the wall, for the

bath itself, and for the ceiling? (This could have an effect on the

combinations.)


--  How many total combinations are there? If there are X patterns, and Y

colors, and Z sizes, then can the range of X * Y * Z combinations be

pre-rendered and stored on the server? Or is the range so vast that we'd

have to rely on some type of realtime rendering?


If there's a finite range then people have done similar projects in

Shockwave before... you might want to call out to separate JPEGs on the

server for elements as they're needed. In other situations you might be

able to use Flash's tinting abilities... if you animate the tint you can

jump to a specific frame to get a specific coloring effect.


Just some musings here... how does the project actually lay out...?


jd







John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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