Fine details with Vectors

September.30.2010 · Posted By - Allan

We do love making vintage aircrafts and these historical flying machines are living art up to this era, modeling was a challenge since most references are really a not easy fish to catch even on most popular search engines in the internet today, you may find yourself lucky if you do get a better ones but the story does not end there another big challenge is the texture art. Aircraft details in terms of mechanically can be put up together with series of reference images even not high resolution and you can always find a way to construct them in 80%  accurate or better yet 99% depending if you have the eye for details or you were born later 1930’s ! that your Dad showed you the actual one servicing crops pesticides J Reference below is one aircraft the caught my interest its Armstrong Whitworth FK8 aka “Big Ack” it was used in the 1st World War from the 1917.

First I thought It was hard to make that text art and bringing them to a high resolution version so I could make a clean image to lay on my texture for the Aircraft, I know its possible but with a tons of patience making vector lines with Photoshop. But then I found this small program called Vector Magic http://vectormagic.com/desktop its easy to use and automatically trace edges and color sections converting them to either Bitmap and Vector, and I find vector the most flexible option where you can save to EPS or AI.

Below is the sample procedure I did with the Queenie 2 text art.basically it’s a drag and drop item and refining it through the software’s numerous options and tweakings.

Finally the save options

Opening it in Photoshop in 2k resolution or whatever size you want for the project, great for dealing with resizing tiny details, now we can work better with detailing. You can also try generating vectors with logos and hard to manipulate images.

Whats more interesting is that AI vector files can be imported in some 3d programs and in my case Modo does have those features and can make 3d version from vectors.

Try one yourself! Happy modeling..

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