Hello!
At our shop we occasionally do replacement faces for channel letters and what we get in from our subs are hand rubbed paper patterns from the cans that we use to cut new faces from. They are way to big to scan in so what we are trying to come up with is a way to capture images by setting up a stationary camera that we can essentially take a photo of, or even better, acquire the image in photo paint and ultimately bring that into CorelDraw to vectorize and clean up to make a cut file from. I am curious if any of you do something similar and how do you go about it? Id love to be able to access the camera from within photo paint so that we can see on screen how it looks before having to take a shot, then see how it looks, then take another one, etc.... We don't have a camera for this yet and are open to suggestions. Thanks in advance for any help.
The laws of optics and perspective will affect even the most straight and level camera setups. You can't get around the effects of foreshortening. The farther away from center that you go the more measuring accuracy drops off. Try taking a straight on photo of a printed grid and then see how it lines up against an identical grid in the computer. The best you can do is get with photographs is something that is in the ballpark, but replacement faces for channel letters have to be reproduced accurately to fit correctly on the aluminum return.At our shop we often have to create replacement faces for channel letters by cutting the acrylic by hand with power tools. If it's a sign we made then we can pull up the original vector artwork and easily create replacement faces using that. Lots of channel letter signs are made using common typefaces and/or brand artwork. Unfortunately lots of sign companies like messing around with artwork. Too many will do things like squeezing or stretching letters or other artwork elements so they'll fit on fewer sheets of acrylic for routing purposes. Some people just distort fonts out of a very stupid habit. Complicating things worse, some common typefaces have many "flavor" versions made by different type foundries. For instance, Adobe's version of Futura isn't the same as Bitstream's version of Futura, or the Futura made by Paratype or Futura Now made by Monotype. They're all slightly different, which makes something like a channel letter sign set in Futura a potential mine field of problems if you don't have the original artwork.I have one P.I.T.A. project I'm dealing with currently: trying to reproduce the shape of an usual shaped building sign cabinet for a Carl's Jr restaurant. The rounded star shape on the left end of the cabinet is what makes this project a maddening chore. I'm having to take tons of measurements off a pattern of the cabinet our install/service crew made, breaking a lot of things down into right triangles just to get key coordinate points established. Then I have to guesstimate the rest of it. We'll run off paper patterns to see how my result lines up with the field pattern and then make adjustments and run out a new pattern. This is no fun.
Bobby Henderson said:We'll run off paper patterns to see how my result lines up with the field pattern
And then factor in paper dimensional changes due to atmospherics. Printable film is more stable.