Good morning, I'm a marketing coordinator for a design prototyping company in South Florida named WB Engineering (http://www.wb-3d.com). This upcoming summer they're going to be throwing a lot of different events and so I've been getting ready with ways to promote them through advertising. My latest project has been a car wrap - a design that when finished, should completely fit an XB Scion 2009. I initially started the project on Photoshop because the representative from our car wrap agency said it would be a good idea to. I'm an art student so I knew there would be complications then and there but I didn't say anything, I just did the design in hi-res and then sent it out via PDF. I got it back earlier this week and after a meeting, was told the inevitable: the files are too small to be used on a vehicle size and would all need to be vector-based files. The problem is after getting off the phone with one of our sellers, they don't have any high-resolution vector images to be stretched 5x it's size and still look crisp. This puts me in a bind because of the whole confusion with jpegs in vectors. Can someone that is a lot more knowledgable in Illustrator help me out as to what to do? I've been adding shapes and type through Illustrator but I really need to find some kind of alternative with images. If there is any kind of loophole I don't know about with converting or changing images so that they can work as vectors that will look crisp no matter what, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for your time and effort, WBEngineering
Regular images are made up of pixel information. For example a 200x200 image has 200 wide by 200 high of pixel color information. Thus if you scale it, it will look blocky and blurry because there isn't enough detail to maintain sharpness at high sizes. Vector based images are totally different. For example an image of a circle filled with a black to white gradient. The vector file would have the math information about the circles size and angles. And the math information about the gradient. So when you display the image on your screen your computer draws the image based on the vector guidelines in the file. Thus if you scaled it 100x it would still look perfectly sharp because the computer will draw out a circle 100x bigger. (kind of hard for me to explain, should check out wiki) You cannot convert an image to a vector. Depending on what kind of images you're using, you may be able to trace some and draw them out, if you're skilled enough with illustrator. I'm afraid that's your only option, or find a way to get a hold of some ridiculously high resolution images. You can also make high quality vector images out of high end 3d software such as maya and 3dsmax, or you could make your own high resolution images with high end 3d software that look realistic enough. Though much more difficult. What kind of images do you have to work with?
Yeah I understand what you mean, I was really frustrated because the images were pixelated, then I tried to contact our sellers (we're Autodesk resellers) and their marketing director told us that besides 5inch jpeg-converted vector images, they really had no other high resolution files to use. I was looking into 3DS Max because we sell that software and use it, but found out that there are certain tasks to be completed to get the file as an .ai or .eps high res file, and although my boss and co-workers know the software well, I'm not familiar with that software at all. Now with tracing, how exactly would that happen? I get a brush or use the pen tool? Thank you very much for your help and time.
