Estes Decals, Fin & File Types

[thobin]

So I just had a wild hair this week as I was looking for Estes rockets to clone and I decided to clean up some of the decal sheets of some of the rockets I'm interested in. The first one took me almost 8 hours as my Gimp skills are very rusty but I think it turned out well, the Rigel 3. I will share them at some point, so first question I have is what file type should I save them in, as far as I can tell and read PNG would be good cause you can save a invisible background. My only concern is scaling, I'm learning that some of these files are not one to one which is a problem if they have no scale mark present.

If you have any decal sets you have done lets do some trading. I’m even going to clean up some of the ones with white so one day when white printing becomes easier to do, we will be ready to go. There are some pretty creative ways to get white with just printing on white decal paper, just a little more work is involved.

I’m also going to create DXF files for the fin sets and card stock parts, there are a lot of lasers out there now, time they started pulling their weight. Once again if you have some DXF files to share let me know and we can swap files.

TA

 

[James Duffy]

Draw and save in a vector format, and you'll always be able to resize for any size project. Adobe Illustrator is ideal, Corel Draw will work, and Inkscape is a freebie alternative.

 

[thobin]

It's neat to see how may graphics they reuse from rocket to rocket. Vector humm I can do that will it save a empty background in vector?

TA

 

[James Duffy]

Vector humm I can do that will it save a empty background in vector?

I can only speak with regard to Illustrator and Corel Draw, but in those applications it is possible to save files with a clear (or empty) background.

James

 

[thobin]

Looking for this font, I found something close but the S an U are off.

TA

 

[K'Tesh]

Don't save files as .jpg. Jpg files have a lousy compression algorithm that introduces artifacts into solid colors. PNG files are far superior than .jpg files. For my work, I try to get things scanned at >= 300 DPI.

 

[thobin]

Ya JPG sucks and that's what a bunch of them are in and part of the problem there are some tiffs too.

TA

 

[dpower]

For raster formats, TIFF is by far the most flexible, and supports lossless compression. When drawing your own, the original vector format is the best, but for sharing, TIFF for raster, SVG for vector.

 

[Bluegrass Rocket]

Font looks like Microstyle to me. Huh, Microstyle Bold Extended.