How to layer images with php??? maybe

Anon

Hi gang,
Here's my question???
I am putting together a clothing store on-line that basically will sell jackets and shirts. What I am hoping to do is create a virtual dressing room that will show the potential buyer what that white shirt will look like with that black jacket and then try that same shirt with a gray jacket. My problem is that I do not want to take a picture of every combination or play around with layering within photoshop first and then shipping out a single image. I am hoping that I can just click a button that will take the shirt, bring it in and then bring in the transparent gif of the jacket on top of shirt (i'm guessing some sort of absolute value for the jacket). Does this make sense for php or should I be looking elsewhere. Also I will put all the images in a mysql table.

Thanks,

Sean C.

Anon

That could be challenging project. I

f you use an image format that has support for transparency, then you could use a little dhtml to layer pictures on top of each other. I hear that png has support for transparency and also support for photo quality images. If you're real good with photoshop and download speed is not the most important factor, you can do it with gif.

If you pull this off, send me the url so I can see it.

Actually, I just thought of a site that is already doing this. If you go to the ferrari web site, they have a little application that let's you pick the color of the car and put it in the scenery of your choice. I saw it a few months ago, so I don't know if it's still there.

I'd like to try to find it, but it doesn't look good if I'm at work checking out the Ferarri web site.

Good Luck,
Matt

[deleted]

First, don't put all the images into an sql table, you'll only slow things down.
instead, store the location of the image in the table, so you can still search for an image. This saves you the trouble of building a script that fetches the image from the database and passes it on to the browser.

Theoretically you should be able to simply put any number of images on the browser screen and put them right ontop of eachother. I'm sure you have seen those websites where balloons fly across your screen...

Anon

Yes the shopping cart I am going to use is phpshop which does the same thing of just pointing to the image. And the product images will be the shirts I use. Definitely a time saver.

Anon

I use Photoshop to create gif files (pretty easy..create something and then save to web does most of the work for you) .

I tried to find the ferrari site (of course it's business related) but had trouble finding the right one. And I'm guessing the official Ferrari site is using javascript or flash. If you find it let me know ...

If I can get this done I'll post the url.....

Sean C.

trippyd

Php will do fine as a back end on this, but to achieve what you are talking about without beating your server to hell (on the fly image generation is a beast) would be to use DHTML and CSS-P and do the dressing of the dummy client side. That is how the balloons floating around a website work.

Anon

Check out: http://www.bmwmotorcycles.com/r1100s.html

Roll your mouse over the different colors available for the motorcycle. BMW Does this on all of their motorcycle pages. Is kinda cool...the different colors are just "shells" that are laid over the base image of the bike. Controlled by a javascript rollover function. Something along these lines may be helpful.