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Michel P. Morrisette
"While I have been learning the basics of this program since about June/early July, this is the first real project I have undertaken as a practice exercise to see just how much I can do with this program.
I decided to do a generalized perspective technical drawing/render of the classic Star Trek series communicator. This was a practice project, not an exercise in accuracy, but I tried to make this rendered illustration fairly honest, decently done and thought-out to speed up my technical learning
process. I didn't want to spend any extra time at this stage worrying too much about accuracy, size or proportion." |
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"All of the basic linework AND text is done in High Design CAD 1.04 and the new beta version 1.1. The additional detail, color and texturing were done in Adobe Photoshop 7."
"The completed rendered illustration & graphics were completed in about 3 days."
"The screen grabs represent the combinations of viewing different parts of the illustration using either layers or object transparency or utilizing the
Sheets function to make additional sheets within the drawing file that can have transparency, as well."
"By rearranging sheets and layers and also manipulating transparency, these are some of the ways this illustration can be viewed and/or printed out.
One of the screen grabs represents the raw linework that provided the foundation for the illustration and served as template in Photoshop."
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"The purpose of this render/project/exercise was to put to use as many features and functions as I could and to also show how wonderfully well
HighDesign Cad for Mac works with product design and product illustration.
The only function I didn't put to use was dimensioning, but I utilized just about every other feature offered in this CAD package."
"The "3D" is set up with traditional construction lines to vanishing points on a constructed horizon line. However, HighDesign's extruding function
works with any geometry, so once the main perspective lines are set, when you start extruding shapes you can use the converging lines as a guide path to
set set up all the extruded shapes to the correct angles and orientations.
The cover grid was only laid out in a basic outline form in HighDesign. The actual addition of adding the holes, copying the perspective and
rendering the materials was all done in Photoshop."
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"I started with flat layout of what the sheet metal would look like before it
would be bent (this part could've been done in High Design,also, but since I
was already working in photoshop, making the flat cover shape and adding the
grid holes was just as simple to accomplish). The circular holes were then
knocked out to be "see-through". I then proceeded to simulate the gold metal
look, on the flat piece, using a series of layer styles in Photoshop. Then,
by cutting and moving away the all the side pieces and using the distort
tool under the edit transform menu in PS 7, using my CAD drawing as a
template, I distorted all the individual pieces to fit in those cover areas
on the Cad outline version."
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"After completing the render in Photoshop, I created a duplicate copy of the
image file, cropped the image to a visual pleasing size and saved the image
as a high resolution Jpeg (set with quality at Max). I have found that the
HighDesign app runs quicker with Jpeg images than with Tiff's for some
reason. As long as the Jpeg quality mode in Photoshop is set to max., there
is little to no appreciable quality loss in the image and the file size
drops dramatically. The communicator Photoshop native file was a 18mb file
reduced to a 4mb Jpeg and I think quality is still good and there is still
some room to enlarge the image, if necessary."
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"Once back to HighDesign, I created 4 empty sheets. The 1st contained the
yellow gridded and red gradient background and all of the yellow colored
text. The second sheet contained a duplicated layer of the initial line work
of the communicator where I changed the linework color to white and added
additional callouts for the various components (also in white). On the 3rd
sheet, resides my original black linework. On the 4th sheet, the Photoshop
render was then imported in the insert picture command in HighDesign and
using either the scale drawing command (set to selected objects only) or
changing the scale of the sheet in the Sheets palette, I proceeded to match
the scale of my linework and also align the render to my linework. By
clicking the sheet transparency on/off in the Sheets palette and turning
on/off different sheets, the drawing becomes an interactive one and the 3
different graphics look are the result."
Michel P. Morrisette
High Designer & Disciple.
Owner & Senior Designer, Original series Trek afficionado (NOT "Trekkie"), memory epsilon
mpsett@the-spa.com
Western Massachusetts, USA
"I specialize in medium & large format illustration (computer and conventional)
Other titles include Graphic, product, product packaging and furniture designer."
Hardware & Software used
A 1996 Beige Desktop Mac running a Sonnet Encore ZIF G4 1ghz processor with 1mb of L3 backside cache with PCI USB 1.0 & 2.0, PCI firewire
ATI Radeon 7000 w 32mb DDR ram
21" Sony Monitor
(2) 60 Gb 7400 rpm IDE hard drives
768 mb of RAM
Running OS X ver 10.2.8
"Star Trek" and all related terms are registered trademarks of and copyright Paramount Pictures, Inc. Paramount Pictures is a registered trademark of Viacom, Inc. "Photoshop" is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. All other product names are the property of their respective owners.
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