Shoe Designer Web Application Javascript PHP no Flash

Hey guys,

I am about to engage in some work that would require me to develop a custom shoe designer, similar to www.shoesofprey.com/3d. I’m currently researching on some ways develop a way to generate the images of the shoes when the user change the style for example the color of the shoe’s heel or the shoe’s body. Due to the fact that we need to allow support on the Ipad and other similar devices, we cannot use flash for this application. I have also looked at a custom tshirt designer plugin just to get an idea on how this sort of thing works

Can any one correct me if I’m wrong in how this sort of functionality works?

  1. The user for example picks a pink heel for their shoe, the change request is sent to the server
  2. The server then looks for an image layer that corresponds to the pink heel, then does the same thing for all other parts of the shoe
  3. The server would then join the parts together to make the final shoe, then generates the image
  4. Steps 2-3 would be repeated until enough perpectives are developed to allow ‘3d rotation’ of the shoe
  5. The generated images are downloaded for the user to view and javascript will mimic the ‘3d rotation’

If this is the case, and if the user is allowed to change any part of the shoe with a particular style, am I correct to assume that I would need to create about 50 -100 images per shoe, to account for the thousands of possibilities for one particular shoe that could possibly be made with the designer?

Or would there be a better way create this functionality? Any ideas or resources and clarifications to the above questions would be helpful.

Thanks in advance guys.

Well the new HTML5 canvas command does allow the colour of an image to be manipulated in the browser, but it’s relatively new and browser compatability issues aside I’ve no idea how it will behave with multiple layers.

PHP web servers normally have the GDLibrary plugin enabled and its image capabilities to create shapes and work with colour are well documented and because the output of the script can be saved as image file (jpg,gif,png) these could be filed and re-used plus the same variables used to change one image can be applied to all the corresponding pieces rotation images. So you don’t have to create the entire set of possible colour combinations by hand yourself the users and the script do it for you.

It’s a helluva project, I hope you charge the client a bloody fortune.

Thanks Sofo7, It kinda clarified on how I think this is going to work out. I’ll have a look at the GDLibrary further, whilst on that not I also heard of imagemagick which apparently does the same thing as well. So I’ll have a look at both.

In terms of price not sure cause contracts not set in stone yet. I’ll find out.

Thanks