Vehicle Templates - Any New Alternatives?

[Bobby H]

We have been using the Pro Vehicle Outlines library from Mr. Clipart for the last few years in vehicle wrap projects. It's common knowledge the templates are not 100% accurate, but I've been pretty unimpressed by how inaccurate some of the templates can be. I can't help but suspect many of these templates were merely vector-traced over the top of photographs.

The template inaccuracy is a recipe for disaster if someone tries to rush out a wrap design without first recording an accurate vehicle survey and making all the necessary adjustments to the template (or just throwing the template in the trash).

Has anyone found any better alternatives to Pro Vehicle Outlines, something where the vehicle templates are much more accurate?

My own web searches have brought up only a couple other possibilities. I'm not familiar with Art Station Vehicle Templates. I know about the templates from The Bad Wrap. Unfortunately those are raster-based and 1/10 scale. We prefer vector-based templates since we have to build our designs using a combination of Adobe Illustrator/CorelDRAW and Adobe Photoshop.

 

[Fred Weiss]

There's not much competition because DigitalDesignware has such a huge head start. We looked at Art Station Vehicle Templates a couple of years ago as a potential licensed publisher and found measurement variations for top view length vs. side view length in several templates right off the bat. At that point we stopped looking.

 

[Bobby H]

That's disappointing.

These template libraries are often sold with big claims on template accuracy while the actual truth is something different.

Considering modern vehicles are all designed and produced using high end 3D CAD/CAM/CAE systems, it's funny the car companies themselves aren't selling or even giving away 100% accurate vector-based 2D profile view files of their cars and trucks. Such a thing might help with some big fleet vehicle orders (police cars, delivery vans, etc.). If I was an executive at GM or Ford I would consider doing it. It's not like those flat views could be used for anything else.

The vehicle wrap sales & production process is currently a bit more cumbersome than it needs to be. Vehicle templates are good as a sales tool to get the project started and give the customer an idea of how the finished product may look. It takes a detailed survey of the vehicle in order to build the final, full scale version of the wrap. Then those numbers have to be used to build the foundation of the final layout. That often means trashing some of the original concept art.

 

[CheapVehicleWrap]

Makea youa own. Only way to be exact.

 

[Bobby H]

Even vehicle photographs have their problems.

It is very difficult, if not optically impossible to defeat what the laws of visual perspective will do to subtly distort a photograph. This is even when the camera is mounted level on a tripod and moved back a considerable distance to eliminate barrel distortion in a camera's zoom lens.

I usually don't trust photographs of vehicles (or signs, building fronts, etc.) unless I'm the one who took the shots. Too many photos have wide angle barrel distortion, were taken at an angle, taken off level or have other issues.

Even if I took the shots (and did as professional a job as I could) I still know some of the details are not going to be accurate in terms of scale. I'll move away from the target object a good distance and then use a telephoto zoom to zoom back into the object and flatten out as much of the perspective as possible. It will make the photo scale a little better, at least into the ballpark "good enough" range, but not "accurate." Some telephoto zoom lenses, particularly the cheaper ones, will bring in a good amount of pincushion distortion when the lens is zoomed to its maximum length.

 

[Mike F]

Kinda curious about alternatives as well, thebadwrap and digitaldesignware are the only ones I've seen that really seem worth the money.

 

[andy]

Impact Vehicle Outlines

http://www.impactgs.co.uk/soft-vl.html

These templates are THE best in the business.. clean vectors in a range of formats some at FULL size (great for Corel). Front, back, roof & both sides of the vehicle included.

These templates are good enough to design & cut remotely... as long as your customer gives you the right make and model number you can cut all your vinyl without ever having to see their vehicle in the flesh.

Before you dismiss these as being only suitable for European shops it's worth checking out the PDF library.. you'll probably find that all the vans you need are in there just with a different name. These days most auto makers haven't got the time or money to develop different models for different parts of the world; a Ford Focus is the same everywhere just like a VW Golf is the same in Berlin or Miami.

 

[marcsitkin]

Has anyone photographing vehicles for layout use tried running the camera/lens correction profiles in Photoshop or Lightroom. I wonder if it increases dimensional accuracy.

 

[Bobby H]

I doubt if Photoshop's lens correction filter does much to improve the situation. It might actually make certain aspects of accuracy and scale even worse.

One could test it by taking a front on photo of some sort of grid, such as identically sized windows or something else with a repeating pattern. Do the transform work and then see how the grid measures out across the photo.

I think photographs can only get you "in the ball park" and only if the photo is carefully taken using steps to ensure the photo position in totally perpendicular to the vehicle side, perspective is flattened/compressed as much as possible through telephoto zoom lens use and any barrel or pincushion distortion is not present in the image. I think certain kinds of reference objects of known size would be helpful to place in the photo with the vehicle profile. That can at least help with adjusting the template.

 

[MikePro]

signart10 dot com
sells the Art Station Templates and has samples that you can download to see their detail.

if you give Brian a call to place an order, tell him I sent ya... he'll most likely give you the same deal that I'm about to jump on.