Quoted from Aurich:in theory there's no longer a need to do everything vector, high rez raster art should be just fine. Which means a scan and cleanup could be done much easier than a full vector redraw.
For plastics and glasses - this could/would/should be suitable, as long as the resolution is there, and it IS a true redraw (as much as possible). I don't think anybody wants essentially a non-redrawn "color-copy" of a cleaned-up scan printed to new media. A re-draw does mean a re-draw. The only exception in recent years is trying to get photographic/oil-painting type backglass artwork off a scan of an NOS source. One then kinda has to stick to leaving the main artwork alone, and only deal with redrawing the fresh score windows, fonts, title logo, white layer, lightblock layer, etc. You can't "redraw" the oil painting found on Paragon's glass, for example.
Playfields are another animal - because there needs to be the ability to scale/move things around to fit as perfectly as possible to features on the wood. You can get a $300 Cruze scan of a playfield, off a $500,000 fine art scanner... and use that as a background guide to redraw a whole new art package... but I can tell you, once it's physically printed to say a clear film, and laid down on the physical wood - it's often up to 1/8" too wide, too tall, too short, etc. Then the "tweaking" begins to make it marry to the wood perfectly. Doing small stretches/shrinks to the length. Pulling an insert ring 1/16" to the right. Etc Etc.
There is no utopian system, and a playfield layout does take final verification and tweaking before ever considering the artwork final/usable. I always used the transparency method - printing the artwork to clear film (see-thru) and laying it down on the actual whitewood for analysis. Make your changes. Print another transparency. Lay it down. Check your work. Make more changes and tweaks. Print another transparency. Etc. I got to the point I could do it in two passes. But for somebody starting out, it's likely going to be more.
I fear being bootstrapped to raster for playfields will allow no freedom to grab and move anything around. Crucial for playfields. Which one will find out when they lay down their first transparency of everything they have drawn.
The key for playfields is the artwork must arrive glove-fit and scaled properly.
Backglasses are a rectangle of X by Y in width/height. Way easy. None of the drama or tweaking. Plastics are similar.
Quoted from xsvtoys: There are still lots of good reasons to create the art as vector, but if you make a 300 dpi bitmap file at the correct physical dimensions then it will be basically the same. Its possible that 200 dpi or 150 dpi might even work. That is a detail CPR should be able to provide.
...and we will provide those details in due time.
Basically, vectorized redraws, with no layering required (WYSIWYG on your screen) is all I can generally say right now to quickly answer the question. If you're doing that, you're safe, and everything you are doing is controllable/scalable/movable later. That will have most who are "raring to go" guaranteed 95% on the correct path. We can deal with final details later. We're not open for submissions just yet. It was an idea for the future - like the end of the year we should be ready.
Reason being, we're in the midst of one primary thing at this moment - getting those ~130 mothballed CPR plastics and glasses since 2004, all back into availability from the digital suite. That will be a couple more months. After that, we move onto the CPR playfield back-catalog, getting all our sold-out titles available again for on-demand ordering. THEN we can open up for hobby submissions.
The new site will be online in about 3-4 weeks I'd say... it will include the guidelines section for preferred format and considerations.
If anything, that gives those interested a good 5 months to get their ducks in a row. Whether they are stewing on a custom project, or a "D-list" repro project they always wanted to see done. Stuff like that.
We realise many are excited with possibilities. We just don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves here. Baby steps through our ramp-up process. We have a great deal of work to see completed to get our back-catalog available. That has to come first. Pet projects/ideas later. Hope everybody understands.
KEVIN
Classic Playfield Reproductions
http://www.classicplayfields.com