We are building a web based application to design custom shirts. It will have the same functionality as http://www.blanklabel.com/Products/Shirt
Both applications, based on visitor’s selections, use pre-generated image slices to display the custom shirt image.
What I wonder is how these slices are generated. Manually by a graphics designer using a graphics or modelling tool(Photoshop/3DSMax etc.) or programmatically using a technique like texture mapping on a 3D model?
Is it possible to achieve realistic results like the ones in blanklabel.com using a programmatic technique?
This would be a guess, but I would create the shirt (or rather the shirt’s components) in a modelling application (Blender, 3ds max, Maya, etc) and set all the UV mapping that way. Then when a user makes a selection, the image is rendered through a game engine (the shadows can be baked as there is no lighting or camera movement) on your servers and then pushed to the client’s browser.