Room configurator for Bauma-Stone
Context
Bauma Stone is a Belgian company that offers high quality stone from all over the world in the form of wall and floor cladding. Today, Bauma Stone's product catalog includes numerous unique natural stones in all shapes and colors.
Objective
With a growing range, it is of course no easier for customers to choose the right facing brick. To help them make a decision, a configurator should be created that allows website visitors to see all available wall claddings in three sample rooms and combine them with different wall colors.
The configurator also went live with the relaunch of the website. There are three rooms to choose from - a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom.
The configurator also went live with the relaunch of the website. There are three rooms to choose from - a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom.
Approach
Two components of this project had to be clarified as early as possible in the pipeline: What should the rooms look like and how do we display the different facing stones?
For Bauma Stone, it was clear that we should start with a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen.
To this end, we selected sample images and assigned them to three architectural styles: Classic Contemporary, Modern Country Style and Nordic Clean - so the client could quickly get an idea of a few different styles. This allowed us to quickly define a suitable look for the individual rooms and waste no time in modeling the rooms.
Clay renders not only look fantastic, they are also ideal for talking about details in geometry and lighting without being distracted by colors, textures and materials. They are ideal for coordinating the room layout.
Textures
Of course, everything revolved around the textures. The photos provided to us by Bauma Stone naturally had to be prepared for use in the configurator: Even under studio conditions, it is incredibly difficult to photograph textures in such a way that the incidence of light and color variation allow images to be seamlessly linked together. Therefore, colors and exposure had to be adjusted and the stones themselves modified to create tileable textures.
The facing brick elements consist of several bricks arranged in a row. One to four of these elements were photographed and made available to us. We then edited the images so that the exposure and colors were adjusted and the content itself was made tileable.
Combining layers instead of creating a separate graphic for each combination allows resource-saving image generation and ensures high performance of the configurator for the customer.
Overlays
Once all the textures had been created, rooms modeled and graphics generated, we created the configurator - in such a way that it could run in any current web browser.
With 6 different wall colors and over 50 different stone veneers, there were well over 300 different combinations - per room.
For performance reasons alone, it was not really an option to have the configurator load a completely separate graphic for each combination - so we create sections that are then overlaid live in the configurator.