Anyone know of a vector pinball artwork site?

[Rook3]

Anyone? Mostly sideart, but backglass art would be fine too.

Thanks,

Rook

[allroy1975]

Why stop there?  why not playfields too?

I want to start doing some playfields.  I don't know why someone hasn't come up with a good way to reproduce them and cover them with some really thin plexi or something.

but to answer the question...no. 

[GreenKnight37]

Ahhh, to answer part of this question, there has only been 1 completely Vectorized playfield done to date by a Pinball enthusiast.

It was for the pinball machine "Fathom" and Vectorized by Greg Walker.  You can read the article here:  http://www.pinballnews.com/learn/fathom.html

And to answer the question:  Why are there no vector sites around?

The Williams brand/trademark was recently sold to a guy in Australia.  He has been suing everyone left and right who makes ANY form of Williams reproduction item.  As some of you may recall, this prompted my post on the Legalities of Vector Art (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,36916.0.html), a little while ago.

So to answer your question...
1.  People don't want to get sued
2.  Pinball fans haven't taken the time to vectorize stuff yet, and if they have done it, its purely for profit.  They don't share the graphics

[allroy1975]

Well, lets start one.  I think I can probably do Black Knight 2000, F-14, Mr & Mrs. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, maybe Bride of Pinbot.

just...shhh...don't tell that Australlian guy.  I'm just finishing up my first "real" vectorization, as I get better I think I'll want to do more. 

Allroy

[Rook3]

Since at the end Bally and Williams were owned/built by the same company, does anyone know if he has the Bally name as well?

It would also be interesting to do artwork by some of the other dead pinball companies, such as Capcom and Atari.

Just an idea.

Rook

[ChadTower]

I'll hazard the guess to say it's a LOT of work to take the playfield apart to the point that you can truly take the high res photos required... there are tons of things on a playfield.

Hrm... could someone use the playfield images in pinmame (or is it visual pinball)?

[Rook3]

I know it's kind of a bass-ackward way of doing things, but the reason I originally asked was because I eventually intend to build a stand alone Vpinball/Pinmame cabinet. I'd like it to be as pinball authentic as possible, and so I'd eventually like to have cabinet art of course.

Still, with cabinet artwork sets for pins up around the $250 mark for "pro" jobs, it might be nice to have an alternative for those DIYSelfers  who might only need a single piece of art.

If I was going to re-do a worn playfield then I'd have no problem paying the $100s of dollars for a professional overlay.

But for a Pinmame cabinet... that's a bit of overkill.

Rook

[GreenKnight37]

Hmmm, well...It would have to depend on what you want for the artwork then.

Some artwork is readily available and you could easily get a Scan of it and have someone make a vector probably, other stuff is a bit more rare.  But still...just the sheer task of scanning a large playfield/pinball machine side art/etc is difficult.

If you need any Swords of Fury pinball art, I can certainly supply that   Thats the machine I own.  Once time permits I'm going to do a high-res scan of the playfield and maybe vectorize it....though I'm sure it would take ages.  But its an idea that I like to kick around

[Rook3]

I think some of the older side art would be pretty easy to vectorize,  keeping in mind, that "easy" is a relative term.

Some of the newer stuff would be pretty impossible to do. Lord of the Rings for instance. Heck, most of the Sega/Data East movie licences would be hard as many of them used photo realistic images taken from publicity stills of the film.

On a related "dumb question" tangent, could one just take a high res photo of an item, crop it accordingly, and just save it in AI as an illustrator file so it could be scaled and printed? Or would it just pixelate like a standard Jepg would?

Rook

[allroy1975]

A friend of mine just bought a Comet, we're going to strip off all the bumpters and plastics and probably take a LOT of hi res pics and use a Stitching program to put it together.  My plan is then to attempt vectorizing it.  I looked at that pin today in Visual Pinall.  It had all the plastics etc on it and wasn't a vectorizable image. 

if anyone has any idea how to do this, please let me know.

I also told him how easy it would be to vectorize the side art on that cabinet to possibly make some stencils.

Allroy