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This is an idea I’ve had for a while, but have never really pressed it at any point. I have absolutely no ambition to make money from anything r/c as I’m afraid the hobby would turn ugly for me. It is a tool that I would love to use and wonder if it may spark with someone that has the skill/desire to make it a reality.

I am a rattle can painter and don’t really have any desire to go to an airbrush. Because of this, color choice and design takes front seat to fancy designs. I use Microsoft’s Paint program to help choose the way colors will look coupled with each other. I go as far as drawing the basic shape of a body and laying down a design. It satisfies me in a Simple Jack kind of way. Very rudimentary mind you.

Long story short(which is impossible at this point)…

I’m wondering if anyone knows of, or can create a program that would take line-art designs of bodies(real or fictional)and couple it with a program similar to paint? One where you could lay out designs and color schemes without having to rely on spatial visualization before laying it down.

We have programmers in our IT department where I work and I've spoken with them, but I think an r/c minded person is what’s really called for. Just a thought…

Same as factory paint jobs?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean.

I'm a simple person too. I play on paint as I haven't spent the time or energy to figure this photoshop down.


Now don't get too excited about the kart, found a drawing online and tweaked it, cleaned up the body panels so I could actually "paint" it.



Are you talking like something like this?

Very cool. What exactly is the process there?

If I'm in a pinch, I'll just clean up an existing drawing. For the EDM's, I can pretty much draw them all day. But using the actual template on dirtmotorsports.com, I used the template as a base on some cause the wheels looked good. Once I clean up the pixels so I can simply fill colors, I can pretty much do anything with it. Only problem is once I save it, I have to clean up the pixels again. I usually fill in everything I don't want to be painted like wheels and background with one color. Then on a separate one, I design or paint on it. Then I simply pull over the one with background painted leaving the paint job on the parts I want. Like on the kart, I simply googled "green marble" and made a background...then pulled the body over that. Ummm...this is getting to be a long description and don't believe I'm making it clear.

You might already know this but when you save something like these in .jpg format you get a loss of information which results in your image getting artifacts in it. Try saving them as a .gif for example.

Johnboy72 wrote:If I'm in a pinch, I'll just clean up an existing drawing. For the EDM's, I can pretty much draw them all day. But using the actual template on dirtmotorsports.com, I used the template as a base on some cause the wheels looked good. Once I clean up the pixels so I can simply fill colors, I can pretty much do anything with it. Only problem is once I save it, I have to clean up the pixels again. I usually fill in everything I don't want to be painted like wheels and background with one color. Then on a separate one, I design or paint on it. Then I simply pull over the one with background painted leaving the paint job on the parts I want. Like on the kart, I simply googled "green marble" and made a background...then pulled the body over that. Ummm...this is getting to be a long description and don't believe I'm making it clear.

I think I understand where you're going. I also thought that taking shots of clear shells and running them through a sketch feature might yield some results. I think once it was in sketch form you could clean it up to appear as line art. Then you could just open it in paint.

I mainly just think something like that would be a cool, fun feature for one of the paint or body companies to have on their site. I emailed a couple, but they apparently weren't interested...

Saving as a bitmap (.bmp) format would be best, as that's a lossless image format. It's also the default format with Paint; back in the Windows 95 days, the only format Paint could use was bitmap.

Team orion used to have profiles for several styles of bodies on their web site, specifically for this reason. You could import it into whatever paint program you happen to use. I haven't looked in several years, but they might still be there. -Jeff

On Rctech, http://www.rctech.net/forum/painting-designs-graphics-photography/60219-blank-templates-designing-paper.html

Use the search for the type of body you're looking for. That's how I lay out ideas for my paint jobs.