Mugs that look like mugs
When we put DoodlePad together, Ashish used to call our mug preview ‘chaude kaan waala aadmi‘ (a guy with broad ears). And yes, that’s precisely how it looked. So the challenge was, make Mugs in DoodlePad look like mugs.
So, with the latest release, DoodlePad now features a three-side view of your design put on mugs. Here’s what we’re talking about,
A brief about how it’s done. The problem at hand here is, cylindrical transform for a flat image or wrapping an image around a cylinder shape (the mug in our case). Going through a lot of existing 3D texturing libraries for Flash, we found they were a little too heavy for what we needed. So we decided to do it on our own. This was accomplished by splitting the image into a large number of vertical strips and placing them at coordinates calculated using simple coordinate geometry. The larger the number of strips, the better is the preview but slower is the performance. Larger number of strips also makes the job simpler as we don’t have to worry about skewing the strips, since the width and hence the skew gets negligible.
That’s it for the jargon. Hope it helps somebody.
For all our dear users and users-to-be, Happy Designing :)
12 comments April 17th, 2007
