3D Basketball Court Designer Case Study: How AllStar Courts Lets Customers Design Custom Courts Online

AllStar Courts builds premium basketball and pickleball courts across Melbourne. Every court is custom — dimensions, surface colours, logos, hoops, fencing — built from the ground up on the client's property. With 25 years of registered building experience, they've earned a reputation for precision and craftsmanship.

But selling a custom court online is hard when every project is different.

A homeowner browsing the site at 9pm wants to know: will the court fit my backyard? What will it look like in blue and grey? Can I add my family name to the surface? How much will fencing on three sides cost?

Gallery photos of past projects answer some of those questions. A 3D court designer answers all of them.

The Challenge

Before the configurator, AllStar Courts' sales process relied on the same workflow most court builders use: the customer calls or fills out a contact form, describes what they want, and waits for a quote. If the customer has a specific vision — a half-court with a three-point line in navy blue, a red key, their logo at centre court, and fencing on the back and sides — that vision lives entirely in their head until a sales conversation translates it into a proposal.

This creates friction at every stage. The customer struggles to articulate exactly what they want. The sales team spends time asking clarifying questions. Misunderstandings lead to revised quotes. And prospects who are still in the "exploring" phase — not yet ready to call — bounce off the site entirely because there's no way to engage with the product.

AllStar Courts needed a tool that would let customers design their court visually, in real time, without needing to speak to anyone — and then submit that design as a quote request when they're ready.

The goal wasn't to replace the sales conversation. It was to make the conversation dramatically more productive by the time it happens.

What We Built

The court designer lives at designer.allstarcourts.com.au and serves as a standalone design tool linked from AllStar Courts' main website. It's built entirely with vanilla Three.js and WebGL — no frameworks, no rendering platforms, just custom code from the ground up.

Court Dimensions

The designer starts with the most fundamental decision: how big is the court? Customers set the overall length and width, plus key dimensions like the three-point line and key area. The 3D model updates in real time as dimensions change — the court surface scales, line markings reposition, and the proportions adjust to reflect exactly what will be built.

This matters more than it sounds. A basketball court isn't a fixed-size product. Every backyard is different. Being able to input exact dimensions and immediately see the result in 3D eliminates the guesswork that traditionally requires a site visit to resolve.

Surface Colours

Customers choose colours for three distinct zones: the main court surface, the key area, and the edging. Each zone updates independently in the 3D view, letting customers experiment with combinations — a charcoal surface with a blue key and grey edging, or an all-green court with white edging for a classic look.

Colour selection is where static photos fail hardest. AllStar Courts offers enough colour combinations that photographing every permutation is impractical. The 3D designer renders any combination on demand, giving customers confidence in their choice before a single tile is laid.

Logo Placement

This was one of the most requested features — and one of the most technically interesting to build. Customers can place a logo on the court surface, choosing from six predefined positions (centre court, baseline, sideline, and variations). The logo is projected onto the 3D surface and renders in real time as the customer repositions it.

For homeowners, this means adding a family name or monogram. For commercial clients — gyms, schools, sports clubs — it means visualising their brand on the playing surface before committing. Either way, it transforms the court from a commodity product into something personal.

Hoop Selection

The designer includes two hoop styles — both heavy-duty, spring-loaded systems with tempered glass backboards (60" and 70"). Selecting a hoop swaps the 3D model in the scene, so customers see the proportional difference between options in context with their court dimensions.

Fencing Configuration

Fencing was the most complex piece of configuration logic in the project. Customers can toggle fencing independently on all four sides of the court, and adjust the distance of each fence from the court edge. The 3D model generates fence posts, panels, and gates dynamically based on these parameters.

The complexity comes from the interdependencies. Fence distance affects the total footprint of the installation. Corner posts need to connect when adjacent sides are both fenced. Gate placement follows specific rules. And all of this needs to render correctly across any combination of court dimensions and fencing selections.

Getting this right meant building a procedural generation system rather than swapping static models — the fence geometry is calculated and rendered on the fly based on the customer's exact inputs.

Save, Screenshot, and Quote

Customers can save multiple court designs locally, capture screenshots of their configured court, and — when ready — submit their design as a formal quote request. The quote form collects contact details and delivery information alongside the full specification of the designed court.

This is the commercial engine of the tool. Every design submitted is a qualified lead with a complete specification attached. The sales team doesn't need to ask "what did you have in mind?" — they can see exactly what the customer designed and quote accordingly.

The Technical Build

Unlike some projects where we use rendering platforms to accelerate delivery, this configurator was built entirely from scratch with Three.js and WebGL. The project's requirements made this the right choice.

Why Custom Three.js

The court designer has unique rendering requirements that don't map well to generic 3D platforms. The court surface is parametric — it changes shape based on dimension inputs. Line markings are drawn programmatically based on court type and dimensions. Fencing is procedurally generated. Logo projection needs to conform to the court surface.

These aren't material-swap operations (change the colour of an existing model). They're geometric operations — the 3D scene is constructed dynamically based on user input. That requires direct control over the rendering pipeline, which is exactly what Three.js provides.

Procedural Geometry

The court surface, line markings, and fencing are all generated procedurally. When a customer changes the court width from 10 metres to 12 metres, the system doesn't load a new model — it recalculates vertices, redraws line positions, and regenerates fence geometry in real time. This keeps the experience fluid and responsive, with no loading delays between configuration changes.

Performance

Because the scene is relatively contained — a court surface, markings, fencing, hoops, and a logo — the rendering performance is excellent even on mid-range mobile devices. The entire application loads fast and runs at a smooth frame rate without the overhead of a third-party rendering platform.

How It Fits the Sales Process

The court designer doesn't exist in isolation. It's a deliberate part of AllStar Courts' sales funnel, positioned to capture and qualify prospects who aren't yet ready to pick up the phone.

Browse → Design → Quote → Build

The customer journey now looks like this:

1. Browse — the customer finds AllStar Courts through search or social media and explores the gallery of completed projects
2. Design — instead of bouncing, they click through to the 3D designer and start configuring their own court. They spend five, ten, fifteen minutes experimenting with colours, dimensions, fencing, and logos
3. Quote — when they're satisfied with their design, they submit it as a quote request. The design specification is attached automatically
4. Build — the sales team follows up with a qualified lead who already knows exactly what they want

The designer converts passive browsers into active prospects. A customer who has spent fifteen minutes designing their court has already made an emotional investment in the outcome. They're not comparison-shopping anymore — they're planning a purchase.

Reducing the Sales Cycle

The traditional quote process for a custom court involves multiple calls, emails, and sometimes a site visit before the customer and the builder are aligned on scope. The 3D designer compresses that. When a quote request arrives with a fully specified design — dimensions, colours, logo, fencing, hoops — the first conversation starts from a position of clarity rather than discovery.

This is particularly valuable for AllStar Courts as a sales acceleration tool. Fewer rounds of clarification means faster quotes, shorter sales cycles, and more time spent on installation rather than administration.

Competitive Advantage

The basketball court market in Australia — and globally — is still dominated by 2D design tools and static galleries. Most court builders ask customers to pick colours from a swatch card and imagine the rest.

Of the major players, only VersaCourt and OnCourt have comparable 3D design tools. SnapSports, SportCourt, CBA Sports, and Mateflex still use flat 2D builders. In the Australian market specifically, AllStar Courts is the only builder with a true 3D configurator.

That's a meaningful differentiator. When a homeowner is comparing court builders, AllStar Courts is the one that lets them see their exact court — their dimensions, their colours, their logo — rendered in 3D before they've spent a dollar. It signals a level of sophistication and customer-centricity that static galleries can't match.

Project Timeline and Scope

The court designer was delivered in approximately two to three months from kickoff to launch. The project fell within our Professional tier — a multi-feature configurator with custom 3D rendering, configuration logic, save/share functionality, and quote system integration.

The bulk of the development time was spent on three areas:

• Procedural fencing logic — calculating and rendering fence geometry dynamically across variable court dimensions and side-specific toggle states
• Logo projection — uploading, positioning, and rendering custom logos on the court surface with correct scaling and placement across six positions
• Dimension-driven geometry — ensuring that every element of the 3D scene (surface, markings, key area, edging) responds correctly to arbitrary dimension inputs

These are the kinds of engineering challenges that separate a functional prototype from a production-grade tool. Getting the fencing geometry right for every possible combination of sides, distances, and court sizes required careful architectural decisions early in the project — decisions that paid off when the tool went live and worked correctly for every configuration customers threw at it.

What Other Businesses Can Learn

AllStar Courts' designer works because it solves the core problem of selling custom physical products online: the customer can't see what they're buying until it's built.

The same pattern applies to any business where:

• The product is spatial — dimensions matter, and customers need to understand how it fits their space
• Colour and material choices are visual — swatches and descriptions aren't enough to commit
• Personalisation is a selling point — logos, branding, custom details that make the product feel like theirs
• The quoting process is manual — a configurator can capture specifications that would otherwise require multiple conversations to establish

Sports courts, playgrounds, outdoor structures, modular buildings, landscaping features — any product where the customer is imagining the outcome instead of seeing it is a candidate for a 3D configurator. For very different takes on the same principle, see our Leef Doors case study (guided wizard with live pricing) or MrTafel's furniture configurators (three product categories with AR).

The Bottom Line

AllStar Courts' 3D basketball court designer turns a traditionally offline, conversation-heavy sales process into something a customer can start on their own — at any time, from any device. It captures qualified leads with complete specifications attached. It differentiates AllStar Courts from every other court builder in the Australian market. And it does it all in a browser, with no downloads, no plugins, and no friction.

The designer is live at designer.allstarcourts.com.au. Try designing a court yourself — pick your colours, drop in a logo, add some fencing — and see what a custom-built 3D configurator can do for a physical product business. For a B2B take on the same idea, see how Hulck configured heavy-duty industrial trailers with 23+ attributes.