Hey guys and thanks as always. Now that my wonderful pedestal is done, its time for a new build. And i am fully rehabbing my first cabinet that never saw any glory days. At this moment id like to start working on my control panel top. In the past ive had great success with both my cp builds and artwork on them. But for the first time id like to do it the "right" way. In the past on 2 builds i used artwork on the cp that really wouldnt matter where holes fell. One was just a marquee collage for a friend, and another was a sweet ambient mortalkombat artwork that just went down and i drilled wherever i needed to. My 3rd was more intricately done, where i had a lot of characters and different things placed around the artwork, ie: a lougi balancing on top of the spinner ball. I was able to roughly measure where buttons and joys would fall and it came out great but this time i was thinking of mapping out my cp in a 3d sketcher or something. I want to have all my holes perfectly placed in the diagram so i can do perfect photoshopping over it. Ive seen beautiful cps with colors or artwork perfectly surrounding joysticks, or arrows around the joys. So i guess to pinpoint a question, here it is. If i already have a control panel built with holes drilled and already finished, but want to do new more precise artwork, what method would YOU use?
I feel a good but long way would be to just create a pushbutton size black marker in photoshop, and measure the side and top of every single button, placing a marker over it. I would have to be very careful with measurements. It would be easier if things werent pre drilled because then i can lay them out myself in a sketch program. But since they are already there, im just trying to figure out the most productive way to go about mapping out my current holes to do some real nice artwork around them
also, one upside is since i have the original artwork already installed i can use it as a reference for where buttons will actual fall as a backup measurement