Decal tutorial

[SteveChoryan]

Adding a decal in Pro-E Wildfire 4 is as easy as 1 2 3. Made a custom intro for Planet PTC enjoy

[ptc-2580255]

Hey Steve, I liked your tutorial a lot. Very helpful!

Though I have one or two questions:

1) It happens to me that when I apply a decal to a surface, it depends how the surface is oriented on screen. This means mostly it is totally crucket on the surface and I have a hard time arranging it. Becasue of this I use perpendicular views to apply it right. I could not see that in your video. It seemed to me that the decal was applied correctly even your part was somehow oriented in space. Is there some setting that controls that?

2) You said your decal was made in Photoshop. I use PSP Ultra from Corel. ( a lot cheaper ).

Anyway, I always have problems with the quality of the picture as soon as it comes into ProE. It seems the resolution is somehow different in ProE than in PSP. I can see bigger pixels in ProE, which results in a a very "rough" picture. What do you recomend to use in your Photoeditor in terms of size, DPI etc. so that the quality stays good in ProE.

thanks for your feedback.

Best regards

Alfred

[SteveChoryan]

1) What version of Pro-E are you on?

2) the image i applied had a resolution of 72 dpi, ive gone as high up as 300. the key to not making your graphic looking pixelated is to make sure your graphic is as large or larger then the surface it is being applied to. So lets say you have a rectangular surface that is bent like mine was, and lets say the dimensions are 50 inches wide x 100 inches long, then when im in photoshop i switch from pixel size when creating the image to inches and try to make it the same size as my surface. if it is smaller this will result in a huge loss of quality as it tries to stretch it to fit the surface. even a high dpi will not fix this issue.

3) the settings i am using in the video are standard out of the box settings. this way any pro-e user can follow along. if you send me an example of the surface you are having issues with i should be able to give you a better answer on this. the only thing i did was make sure i selected the side of the surface i wanted the decal to show up on. then i went and edited its position in the decal tab. I have seen instances though were it applies a decal weird and you have to flip it to get it to look right, but that is a rare case

[Sto]

Steve,

i just used your video to help me model a logo on a plastic part. excellant. thanks very much.

Any other tips on transferring Jpegs or tiff files to 3d in wildfire 5.

Is  there another format i can get graphic people to send me logos which import straight into sketcher???

Thanks again John

[CamiloParraPala]

I recomend to use .png files for this, because they also can include transparency feature and they have low weight.