Hey there! Course is awesome so far, but I'll probably have to wait until after the holiday and family leaves town to get back to it.
In the meantime I figured I'd ask. How do you usually prepare these decal sheets? Is there a straightforward way to collect the right markings from photograph references?
Or is it just Photoshop power-use?
I intend to do a different camera for the final project and while I have all the reference photos I need already, and own the camera, not sure how to go about getting the markings to be so perfect.
I'll take a couple of guesses. Downloaded from the internet. Made them in Adobe Illustrator. Payed someone to make them for her. Used A.I to generate them. They come with the camera. She called the company and they mailed it. At least one must be right.
I have always wished Blender had Adobe illustrator type of functionalities, anything that lets you skip a middle software is always most welcomed. Blender Institute should merge with one of them Krita or Gimp guys and mate them software's, like the Chocobo's in FF7.
I mean... there's this little part of Blender called Grease Penci. At least for the shapes :D Actually, a blend of the Text, Grease Pencil, and Curve tools, you probably could come up with what you needed to create your own set of labels... at least for the color. Not sure about how you would go about creating the normal map for it, but there's probably something you could do.
This is something AI is really good at. Low res reference and it can produce clean high res versions. This would be my first choice solution.
Covering all the bases Omar! Lol.
Yeah, I was hoping there would be a fail proof trick, because designing them from scratch would not be too bad, but it's definitely time-consuming.
Searching for ready-to-use online and AI would definitely be my first try if there isn't an easier workflow.
And I hear you guys... There are some great tools for it within Blender but I use AI (as in Illustrator) almost daily, so that'd be easier too. It's cool that they all play nice. I wish Blender would at least accept the vector files from it the same way it will accept PSDs.
You mean like an SVG? There's an add-on that lets you import them.
No, more like an .ai or .eps file. But yes, the workaround is indeed exporting an extra file as an svg and import that as curves. Always so messy too. But I have a saved node tree to clean that up as best as possible.
Little things that are definitely not a priority for dev, but would be a huge time saver if we had a more direct workflow.
Lol, makes sense! Yeah... nothing like a project based painful learning experience 😅
Got it! I'll start digging for images that match my camera and if not, dive into PS after all.
Thanks for revealing the mystery!