PLEASE HELP - What's the best way to create custom 3D product images b

[eva4]

Hi all,

any help or comment would be much appreciated! This is quite urgent.

I'm a designer doing some research.. so totally have no clue which technology is best to use for this sort of thing! will get a programmer involved later however need some sort of direction!

We have this idea of building an eccomerce site for a client, for various items, for example, a car. and there are lots of different textures, colours, patterns they want to appear in the image as the user selects this.

They only have photos of the original car, with various mirrors, wheels etc. but they want to be able to put all the different textures on the interior and exterior etc.

Is there a way to do this without have to make a 3D model? or is that the best way to do it?

Are there any java or flash script which can map the image across a 3D object yet still look realistic?

e.g. I found with zazzle.com.au - you can upload your own image, or text and it automatically "wraps" it around the object in a particular spot and is adjustable as well.

see:

http://www.zazzle.com.au/sketch_art_...47449676733223

How did they do this? It's amazing.

However I don't need it to be that amazing with user loading images and all, I just need the ability to be able to add the texture on with pre-set amount of styles and textures.

PLEASE HELP! any off the top of your head ideas welcome.

 

[Hexes]

Ok the first thing is to use a nice and vary flexible client and server side language.

I have done something similar for a company that wanted true realtime 3d models on a site without the user having to install strange software on his side.

Used the following :

To make the models I used 3d Studio max and exported the basic models as 3DSfiles.

Then on the client side I used flash/flex with AS3 for the website and to integrate the real time 3D models.

To get the 3D models into the flash 2D environment I used Away 3D (

http://away3d.com)

All you need is prefab 1.3 or above also part of Away3D it helps you as a designer create all the code you need to display the 3D model in real time in the flash player.

As for the backend I used PHP to run all the database stuff using Mysql 5.2 DB’s and I also made php scripts to streamline and output data in real time to Flash/Flex in xml format.

As for dynamic textures for the models, simply let users upload small jpg files and store in the db what user/page must use what texture and then at runtime/on the live site just let php pull the info and pass it in xml form to Flash/Flex. And flash will load the correct jpg file as a texture map for the model based on the data.

If you want even more texture control and your site is running on linux server you can use backend php scripts and imagemagic php API to create the textures for the user from scratch using info or parameters the user enters on the flash site.