I currently produce a tabletop game that involves scale model sailing/pirate ships that are sculpted in Rhino and 3D-printed. When i sculpt them I have the masts and the sails sculpted despite the fact that to date we only print the hull/deck parts and the junctions and rig bits (model makers use wood dowels for masts and some make their own sails). I’d love to take the sail plan and print the sails as an image that is one to one sized so the model makers could print sails they can cut out to go with their ships.
What i need is a good way to either produce a PDF or other scaled printable image from the sails layer in my Rhino model that prints to scale or a vector graphic that can be scaled in other apps such as in-design.
Right now to produce a scale image we render the image at high DPI and then scaled it (degraded image quality because we are scaling a jpg) in Adobe InDesign based on a known measure then produce a PDF and make sure the scale to fit options are turned off. It’s a long process and the images are large to avoid image degradation. Also i need edge lines with no rendered isocurve lines that are not on the model as features - eg divide lines and things caused by the build process.
Is there a better way? I know there are some features that produce line drawings but I’ve had limited luck doing much with them.
Are the sail shapes you want to print 2D? For cutting?
If so, the most efficient way would be to buplicate teh outlines of these surfaces. That will create curves. Join all those curves into closed curves. Draw next to them a shape of know size, like a 1”x1” square (or some equivalent metric square).
Then export it all as .ai (illustrator) and they teh closed curves can be filled with any color in illustrator. They are now all vectors so no resolution issues appear. You use the reference square shape to scale the artwork accordingly to ensure 1:1 scale in illustrator/indesign/etc.
If you use the similar joined curves from duplicate borders, and create a hatch-solid on those parts, I think that if you file>print with scale 1: 1, output set to vectors and printer set to pdf you might get there in one shot (once you make a macro to do all those steps).
You are welcome. Just make sure that when your team prints these templates they always check that the print is set to 1:1 scale. If there’s content in the page that’s within the margins of the printer (not printable area of the page) the print driver will default to “shrink content to fit page”
You should aim to have the yellow area below without content at all:
