(Topic ID: 220220)

Announce: CPR BEGINS its NEW BUSINESS MODEL

By KevinCPR

5 years ago


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    #197 5 years ago
    Quoted from DMC:

    You could do 1/4 size collectors backglasses for framed wall art.

    Yes! Great idea! I would buy!

    And..any single one-off backglass for any machine that you might want to do, for customization purposes.

    For that matter, anything at all for a backglass you can imagine...you could modify existing ones for example to make girls topless if you are some kind of pervert. Or, make a Big Dick BG. Put yourself in the art work. Drop a cartoon image of yourself in place of the guy in Old Chicago for example.

    Same goes for plastics, now you could customize plastics for a machine any way you like.

    All you need is the artwork. The artwork guidelines from CPR would be good, but they probably are pretty straightforward. It wouldn’t be a CMYK file I presume because that is for ink printing, it would be RGB for digital printing at a certain resolution for the stated physical dimensions, probably 300 dpi. It is probably best to make anything you can vector, but you shouldn’t have to. If you produce a 300 dpi bitmap file with the correct dimensions it should print the same.

    Of course, CPR will be able to print whatever is given them, but if the artwork is crappy then the result will be crappy. So the artwork needs to be good. But there are lots of talented people around who can produce great stuff in the digital realm.

    I’m headed for Photoshop, I have some ideas already...

    #207 5 years ago
    Quoted from winteriscoming:I am guessing cut lines would still need to be vectors. I'm curious how one would approach raster art for something that was originally screened.
    I'm also now curious how the digital printing of the vectors works. Does it accommodate what would effectively be slight translucency in a layer so that when it's overlapped over another that it creates a new color?
    If I'm vectorizing plastics that were originally silk screened, I only have to concern myself with identifying the main colors and I have to ensure that any overlaps are captured in each color layer, and the silk screening process will take care of any resulting colors that come about from multiple layers overlapping.
    If I'm producing a raster image of those same plastics, I now have to be concerned with the resulting color from any overlaps. I suppose a layered raster image could be made.
    Let's say I had a yellow layer overlapping a blue layer. Flattened vector art with no translucency would just show that as yellow, whereas a layered silk screening would result in a green (perhaps more so when light shines through). So if I'm producing a raster image, I'm losing the concept of depth from the layers, and I'm also potentially not capturing (or misrepresenting) the mixes that result from them.
    I'm am an amateur in image processing and printing, so I don't really know how a lot of this works, and could be wrong in my assumptions.

    I'm not a total expert at the graphics, but I have done a fair amount of stuff for work, including both large-scale digital printing for signage and booth graphics as well as offset printing which uses the CMYK format. From what I see so far, it looks like this is a complete digital printing process. That means as you said and as I mentioned before, you don't need vector art necessarily. In fact, you won't even use vector art for the printing even if you created it that way. You will be converting your vector art to a bitmap in order to print it. 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.

    So looking at what you wrote above, from my past experience, whatever you are making there in Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever with the layers, the transparencies, and so forth is going to be boiled down to a flattened, single layer RGB file and that's what the printer will take in and print.

    At some point you will have to deal with gamuts if you want to get picky about colors. There has been some discussion on that already. The gamuts are different for the ink printing process, the offset printing, the digital printing, as well of course as on your monitor. So these things can degenerate into somewhat of a technical mess if the customer is very picky about color. Just making a file look exactly like you want on your uncalibrated color computer monitor in no way is going to guarantee you will get the end result you want.

    The good thing about digital printing is that if you make a test proof on a typical inket printer it probably will be visually close to what this would be. But I am guessing this big printer CPR has will have a bigger gamut so that needs to be considered.

    #212 5 years ago

    Thanks Kevin, great info.

    Good luck on the project, and we have some time to start working on those art files. I have some ideas, but it’s gonna take a good while to get some art produced. 5 months will go by plenty quick!

    Just to summarize, if you stick with vector art for your digital design, you don’t have to worry about 300 dpi or any dpi, or overall size. You will be able to scale it to whatever size/resolution you want with perfect resolution. It’s definitely the best way to go, but possibly not suitable for all types of artwork. If it has to be bitmap, it’s probably best to work at actual size with 300 dpi, maybe even higher. You can always go down in resolution, but never up without some loss.

    Here is an example of a redone vector piece of pinball artwork. Not only completely redone to vector art, but the art was modified by adding the rest of her legs which are not shown on the Bon Voyage backglass. Of course this attached file is a bitmap jpg made from the vector art, but it can be made to any desired size always with perfect resolution. So many possibilities!

    Bambi full (resized).jpgBambi full (resized).jpg

    #214 5 years ago

    I've never seen a full playfield artwork file, and I am not sure if it is even possible to see one because how could it be shared? If it were a bitmap at full size with high resolution like 300dpi, it would be a huge file, at least a few hundred megabytes I would guess. If an entire playfield were completely recreated as vector art, the file size would be much smaller. But that would be a massive undertaking. I'm sure it has been done but I can't imagine how much work that would be. If someone has made one I would love to see what it looks like.

    Here is an example of a single plastic that I did as an experiment. Again this pic of course as a bitmap of the vector art file, but rest assured that this is a full vector file. It is compared to a photo of the plastic and a scan of the graphic. The vector SVG file is only about 25k file size.

    Granted I am far from a pro, but I'm not gonna lie, it was a lot of work just to get that single plastic recreated as all vector art. And this is a fairly simple graphic really. More complex graphics take more time and effort. Just recreating an entire set of plastics would be a pretty hefty job timewise.

    Light Shield M-1330-107-2 graphic comparison small (resized).jpgLight Shield M-1330-107-2 graphic comparison small (resized).jpg

    1 year later
    #402 4 years ago
    Quoted from Cherries_Jubilee:

    CPR is not doing "On-Demand" playfield printing ( On-Demand meaning you order it today & tomorrow they make it )......What they are doing is making a small batch of say 15-20 of the Back-Catalog playfields and when their inventory gets "low" on that title ( say 2-3 ) they will make another small batch....this will allow them to basically have everything "always" in-stock.

    Wait, now I am confused. I have been following this thread but maybe I lost track of some changes. I always thought that once everything was online, as long as the artwork was available somehow, you could order one at any time. This is from the first announcement post in this thread:

    What if we could make one at a time?

    Starting now, this IS the reality at CPR. This changes everything - not only here - but for repro in the hobby at large. This is a staggering new reality here - so let this sink in - THERE IS NOW NO SUCH THING AS A MINIMUM RUN SIZE AT CPR. We can make ten. We can make fifty. We can make one. No barriers to market any longer.

    #405 4 years ago

    I thought about it a bit more. Things aren't so cut and dried, because. Pinball.

    OK, so for a backglass, it seems it should be easy. If you have the artwork, it should be pretty easy to do a one-off. Get the glass, put it in the printer, and you are good to go. Not all backglasses are the same dimensions, but it shouldn't be too hard to stock the different sizes.

    For plastics, its also fairly straightforward, although not as simple as the backglass. You have to be able to cut out all of the different shapes. So that's more work. I'm not sure what process is used to cut those out.

    For a playfield, that's another issue. You can't just pull off a board and print the artwork on it. You have to CNC all of the holes which are different for every machine. And get the inserts, which are different for every playfield, and then install those. That is what makes a one-off playfield not too practical. The only way it might be easy is if you could send in your old sanded playfield and have them print onto that.

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