Is there software available?

floor fitting company looking for picture software

[barrycondon]

Hi Guys,

I'm not sure if I am in the right section but maybe someone may be able to help me.

Is there such thing as software, where you can drag a newly taken picture of a 'floor' of a house into a sotware package that can try out various types of wooden floor finishes to give their customers a 'view' of what their floor could look like?

A lady was enquiring from me yesterday and i've never heard of it?
She said it was not autocad or any industrial type software but that it could be bought in America?

I hope i am making sense,
thanks in advance
Barry.

[barrycondon]

Here I am answering my own message!

Its something like the following website.....like it but not quite the one I'm looking for.

SmartDraw

It would be specific software for wood flooring.

Thanks
Barry

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 12:51 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs please [/edit]

[vkaryl]

Hi barrycondon, and weldome to Webmaster World!

So you're saying take a line drawing of a floor plan and populate it with different wood flooring types so the customer has some idea what she's getting, right?

Autodesk (I don't think it's available any longer) allowed one to do that. Otherwise, places like Lowe's and Home Depot have proprietary stuff which does something similar. Autocad probably could handle this, though it costs the earth.

Seems to me I ran across a 3D home planner type program a while back that would not only do this sort of thing, but allowed "virtual walk-throughs" as well. Let me take a look through my archives and see what I find, okay?

[The_Hat]

Was it 3D Home Architect 4.0 by broderbund vkaryl?
That sounds like what you are thinking about.
The(cat in the)Hat

[vkaryl]

Heya CINT - yup, I do believe that would be the critter, and thanks for helping out my poor ol' mem'ry!

It's a pretty nifty proggie, actually, assuming I remember at all correctly!

[barrycondon]

Thanks vkaryl

I thing what was requested goers even a step further.
This lady asked me if I knew of a program that would actually take a live picture of a room from a digital camera and change the floor coverings, example from brown tile to pine wood?

The idea is that the shop (floor seller) could call the person's house and take a picture in front of the customer, load it on to their laptop, open the program and show the picture with different floors.........sounds complicated but anything is possible

Thanks Again
Barry

[vkaryl]

Wow. That WOULD be neat. I don't know of something like that at this point. I'm not even sure if the programs that the major home-imp stores use can do that.

Maybe would depend on the market for it, and your own financials, but you might try hunting up a programmer....

[mincklerstraat]

You could just use existing standard graphics software to do this:

- representative visits customers' house and sprays floor of targeted room with magenta spraypaint
- representative takes photo, loads into photoshop or gimp, selects magenta and makes a separate layer as mask
- representative shows layers of available floor samples under mask
- customer now also has an extra motivation to go in for new flooring.