Control Panel Art

[cpetzol2]

Hey guys,

I am designing the art for my control panel right now, but I am having some problems. I first modeled my project in AutoCad. When I export what I drew, it is not full size, it is just a screen shot, so when I move it into my 49" x 23" control panel Photoshop drawing, it gets all pixelated, and that does me no good. Is there a way to export full size .bmp's, such as for a plotter or something.

upon discovering this wasnt going to work right, I decided to move to illustrator. I have never used illustrator before, and found it very frustrating. I was not able to be exact about where I wanted things, it seemd like I would just have to eye ball everything, and I dont want to have to do that. I see all of these really nice CP tempates in the forums, did people eyeball them, or is there some kind of coordinate system you can use. In Autocad, you tell it to draw a line from 1,12 to 3,24 and it draws a line connecting those two points.

Can you do something like this in Illustrator?

If not, how do people get their panels mapped out so good.

If anyone can throw out some tips on using illustrator, id be awesome.

[Oddfeld]

Turn on the control palette or the transform palette (from the window menu) and it'll give you coordinates for whatever's selected, and you can type stuff into those palettes to change those coordinates. If whatever's selected isn't just a point, but has dimensions, then you can use the little square-full-of-dots icon in those palettes to determine what the coordinates refer to (so selecting the center dot on the icon makes the coords refer to the center of the object, say). You can change the origin of the coordinate/measurement system by dragging a crosshair out from the corner between where the horizontal and vertical rulers meet (assuming you have rules turned on).

Turn on snap-to-point or snap-to-object to draw things connected to existing paths - the cursor will change when you're within snap distance and you'll draw or drag your object or whatever bang on where the existing object is.

Also, try turning on smart guides and it'll give you a lot more feedback about where you're drawing, with context-sensitive temporary guides and snap - you can be drawing a box or whatever, move the cursor to another existing point on another path while you're sizing your box (don't release the mouse button), move the cursor back to where you actually want the box to finish and you'll find that when you're in the right place you now have a temporary guide flash up that you can snap to, to show that you're aligned with the last point you snapped to, then you can release the mouse button. Smart guides may not be available if you're using a very old version.

[jammyjam]

Instead of exporting, try plotting to a pdf file. It will then open to scale in photoshop.

[Nannuu]

You can also export as a DXF, CGM or EPS file (all vector files).  These can be opened in Illustrator and changed very easily or in Photoshop.