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Old 05-17-2009, 01:33 AM
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PixelOz PixelOz is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Puerto Rico
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I have a lot of models too and...

I have about 5.4 gigabytes of models that I collected over many years but I was very selective and only downloaded those models that I thought were of the best quality or were good in their design. If a model was not of quality I discarded it but some time ago I sat down in my computer and converted them ALL to PDF format. I corrected many size problems with them before converting them and even fixed problems that some models have of having the parts too close to the edge either in vector or bitmap format. Many models are really designed to be A4 or letter size (the big mayority) but some designers give the files incorrect Dpi (dots per inch information) when saving them in a bitmap format (either .jpg, .png or the like) so when people open them in some program like a paint program or an illustration program such as Illustrator they see a huge page measuring 44 inches or something like that but if you look at the Dpi you see that the model is at 72 Dpi or lower and when you look at the proportions you see that the model is really a letter or A4 size model so you reduce it to that size and you see that it fits A4 or letter size paper perfectly and now the Dpi is much higher which was the original intended idea. Most of the time you can tell but sometimes it's a bit more difficult to figure it out so you make an educated guess. Designers should always specify the final Dpi intended for their models or better yet do that and include the two calibration lines, the 1 centimeter line and the 1 inch line in every page and/or even better yet publish the models in PDF format if they can. Most models are really designed for those two mentioned paper sizes. I fixed this in all my models before converting them to PDF. I also took those that have the parts too close to the edge and moved those parts closer to the center to prevent printing area problems in the future because in some models if you just reduce them you change the scale and I wanted to preserve that, if they were in any bitmap format I edited the bitmaps in an editor like The Gimp or Corel Paint X2 to move the parts closer to the center or arrange them in a different way without affecting their quality. I even cleaned many, many that were a bit dirty or even fixed some that had too many compression artifacts. I also changed the names of all the files, yes, thousands of them from something like this sometimes: 1sg4577733.pdf (or 36f77d64.jpg) to something better and more understandable like ShuttlePartsLetterSize1.pdf and/or ShuttleInstructionsLetterSize1.pdf which states the paper size of the model, again, in all the file names and I also specified the scale of all the models that provided it (either in the model or their website) in the folder name in which I stored them. and I stored them in categories like airplanes, cars, trains etc. and well organized. So I did this to ALL of the 5.4 gigabytes of models that I have and now every time I download a model it goes through this process before storing and I have DVD backups of all of it just in case hard disk trouble arises. So how long did it took to do all of this? Months of work of some of my free time that's what it took, Yikes!

Last edited by PixelOz; 05-17-2009 at 01:38 AM.
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