Hey guys and gals
I’m looking for someone to help me build an anvil website although I’m not sure its the correct platform to build the website on
I want to enable my customers to design their own outdoor kitchen and receive a quote and pay via credit card (after calculating the price, according to their design input).
The design process is a 6 step process where the kitchen shape and accessories are chosen. A python dictionary is then updated according to the customers answers and sent to the server. The server then returns a quote (PDF) and two pictures of the designed kitchen.
The design process requires a certain level of logic (Example: if a 60cm kitchen is chosen a 90cm barbeque cannot be chosen since it won’t fit)
- Does anyone know someone willing to look into this?
- Do you think the anvil platform is the way to go?
This would be the unknown part for me, personally, if I were going to try such an app. How are the pictures generated? What sort of pictures are they (e.g. photo-realistic? blueprint? etc)? Is there existing code that generates the pictures? What libraries does it use?
Just some of the questions that you’d need to answer before it’d be obvious how much effort was going to be involved in generating the pictures.
Everything else you mentioned is very doable in Anvil. Some of it might be more annoying than other parts…for example, if part of your 6 step process involved dragging and dropping accessories on a kitchen plan, that sort of thing is possible but working with a canvas always ends up being annoying (even though the end result is generally very cool).
Hey
Thanks for the reply
My thought was to separate the two (Server and front end) and so I didn’t elaborate on it in the initial post.
The server code is python code that runs on Blender where the input is the dictionary that will be sent from the app and the output is two pictures (jpeg format) and a quote (pdf). Here you can see an example of a kitchen design generated by the code:
The backend code is still in progress and there are still some unknowns (for instance, how do I run Blender on the server side) but like I said, my initial thought was to separate the two
Part of my 6 step design process definitely requires some drag and drop and quite frankly that was my main concern when considering Anvil.
Drag and drop of a static text/bitmap from a list to another list?
Or dynamic drag and drop of 3d objects rendered in real time?
They both are feasible, but the former will take just a little time to setup the css and a few event handlers (you can search this forum for drag and drop, I remember seeing some working examples), while the latter will take weeks/months (I have something similar in my plans, I will use threejs).
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You’re going to be looking at either a hosted service that will render Blender files for you, or using uplink and hosting it yourself. The way Anvil server calls work on the regular server is that the entire Python environment is spun up for every server call. Even if you could get Blender somehow installed there, I’d imagine the delay in starting it would be prohibitive. An uplink server, though, can remain running so you only incur that delay once.
That’s totally doable on the client side. As Stefano said, there are multiple approaches, depending on the representation of the objects and the space they’re in.
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