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.
We used to make replacement faces by starting with a trace of the can and using hand power tools. Now we trace it, mark centers, tape it to a grid, use the tripod to photograph from a squared center point for the camera and grid. Save as a RAW, use the lens correction, tweak corrections based on the grid, crop and send JPG to a guy with a hand held CNC. A file we can archive and a near perfect fit for next to nothing.
That's pretty much what we've done in the past, put them on a grid background then correct to the grid. We've just been using phones, etc... but were just looking to find something we could mount and be more permanent.
We typically do just cut them from the patterns with a jigsaw, however, we have one customer that insists on having vinyl cut that is inset 1/8" from the edge of the trimcap. so that there's the trimcap color, a white inset, then the face color... As you can imagine, without a file that makes it rather difficult to pull off. We've rigged up an Olfa with an offset "edgeguide" but its still a huge P.I.T.A. to cut them out.