How often has it happened that you went to a shop to purchase an accessory and liked make of one model but desired the texture of other and material of third.
Objectives
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Web based
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Interface in Japanese.
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Dynamic menu creation according to the item selected.
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The shapes of the bags are defined but the texture and colors of the various segments can be customized.
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All the customizable segments to be listed on menu
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Segments for the chosen accessory should appear simultaneously on the screen as thumbnails.
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User can use menu to choose through different textures or different materials.
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Segments are linked i.e. if two or three sections are linked then user shall have them all in his item or none.
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To begin with, application had 18 categories of material, with each material available in 1 to 25 different textures.
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Default bag came with a price tag which is shown in the same screen with the other descriptions.
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As user customizes his accessory, description keeps changing.
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As the user selects different textures and materials the image of the bag takes up the selected material, so that user could see how would item look with chosen material.
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User could see finally what is he ordering ,both in form of look as well as description.
Customer Profile
Solution
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For each Bag, we were given a preformatted binary files containing detail of bag in its default composition, declaration of customizable segments mentioning textures in which segments are available, views in different angles and layers. ThE binary file contained the image data as well as the textual description.
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Aggressive project schedule
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A utility in VC++ was made to extract information from the binary file and generate action scripts (.as files) which could be consumed by Macromedia Flash.
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The .as files contained linking information, segment details and possible textures.
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Bags and categories were also linked through action scripts.
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In Macromedia Flash 2004, segment images were layered to form complete bag.
The major challenges faced by MARG in the execution of this project were:
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Macromedia Flash 4 could not overlap layers of .png files without hiding them. To overcome this, .png images were converted into .swf files using macromedia fireworks.
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Flash could not load more than 10 layers. There few segments had to be merged to reduce no. of layers.
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Application was to be released in two versions: High resolution and low resolution.
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High resolution files were very bulky with one segment file ranging from 250 to 400 KB. This made processing and uploading, a job of patience.
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