Vectorworks 2010 Products 23
Vectorworks Spotlight 2010 Getting Started Guide
Creating Image Props
Image props are largely an image editing project. There are many applications that will do the work.
I use image props for a variety of things, but mostly to add people/gures to my renderings. The same technique can be used for trees
and small objects that would be complex too model or consume too much memory, like a toaster on a counter. Especially if you are
designing a television commercial and want to be sure that the client’s toaster looks just like the client’s toaster.
Vectorworks ships with a number of great Image Props in the Library for you to work with immediately. If you have the Designer
package or Landmark module you will nd a number of additional Tree Image Props in your Library and I would also suggest
investigating VBvisual Plant tool in the Visualization Tool Set available in all modules only requires RW..
Keep your image le small, larger graphics les can cause Renderworks to work slowly.
In print graphics, les are usually created at the size they need to be printed by 300 DPI. Y
ou will more likely be using a desktop ink jet
printer which works well with 100-150 DPI.
We’ll actually be working with pixels, not DPI, 300 DPI x 3” tall is 900 pixels.
How big is your person going to be when printed? If you will only be outputting to a letter size page, your person may only end up as an
inch or two tall.
Here is where this gets a bit tricky. I create my gures as ‘actual size’ in my photo editor. So a 6’ tall man is a 6’ tall image le but, I set
my DPI very low to keep the le size as small as possible. Usually 5-20 DPI. I determine the DPI by estimating how large the gure will
be in my presentation. Say he will be 2” tall, I need a le that is 300 DPI or 300 pixels tall. I set the pixel height/DPI appropriately.
Although as you will see you can do some of this within Vectorworks, I nd this method eliminates a possibility of error. Generally
speaking, I try to keep most image les under 1MB.
When making an image prop, Vectorworks allows you to mask out the background in a couple of ways. Again, this is often a chore
best tackled in an image editor. In Photoshop and Corel Painter you can create an image mask or channel that Vectorworks can nd
and use as a mask. Alternately you can add a solid color around the gure and mask that color. In both cases, two caveats; 1) be sure
that masking color is also not on the gure or you will have holes in your people and 2) consider the color against which you are going
to place the gure. If you have a dark brown set and you mask out your gure using white, most image editors will ‘anti-alias’ the edge.
That is they don’t just paint white, but they blend the white into the adjacent color; your gure. So if you mask with white and place in a
dark environment, your gure will have a white or light gray outline. Mask your gure in a color close to the background.
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