Redesign of Canon's A320 - legal?

[Gnasher]

Hi folks,

I have just come back from a lovely holiday in the Philippines, with a week of UMT (uninterupted modelling time :)) before that, while the family were away. It's always fun to go to the Philippines, they seem to have a lot more interesting tools and gadgets there than here (as well as beaches, sunshine, etc.!). I picked up a nice pair of clips. They are like normal clips for holding stuff as you would use to hold things while the glue sets, but they have suction cups on the side! So you can stick them to the table and use them like a 3rd hand.

Anyway to my question. We flew Cebu Pacific, an A320 and as I have just finished the Canon model, I am inspired to try and recolour it. The Canon pdfs are protected, so you cannot modify them (I tried to get rid of the think black line on the Starflyer). I could use GIMP to convert them and recolour the jpgs, but is that legal? I have no intention of releasing or sharing the recoloured pages, should I manage it, I would build it for myself. So what is the "accepted" legal status on recolouring models?

I don't what to restart any painful debate on legality and sharing/stealing peoples work that we had on the other forum. If the this thread spirals out of control, I give full permission for the administrators to kill, delete, burn, and bury this thread in 4 different graves.

[John Bowden]

Bottom line................... you can do whatever you want with a model. Except re-color and release it. If you want to re-color it for your own personal use.............have at it.

Posting pictures can cause grief sometimes, but that is usually with individual designers.

It is polite to ask the designer, but again that is if you are going to post pictures.

Let me state that this is my opinion, not that of this board, this forum or these adminstrators............

john

[Fozzy The Bear]

Let me state that this is my opinion, not that of this board, this forum or these adminstrators............

john

There's no need to state that John.... You got it absolutely correct as far as the legal terms are concerned.

Basically Gnasher, as John said, you can do whatever you like with a downloaded model as long as you don't re-distribute the modified files in any way (that includes giving them to a friend or relative, as that would also be illegal).

It's not illegal to photograph your modified finished model and display the photographs either.

All of the above is covered under the terms of fair use.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[Gnasher]

Thanks, guys. So I can have a go with a clear conscious. I hope I'm not biting off more than I can chew! ;) But I know I've got a great resource to back me up . . . you guys!

The Cebu Pacific colour scheme is actually quite simple and refreshing. I think the major dificult will be the curve under the nose!

[maurice]

I see you joined that other forum after this post by one of their more brilliant former contributors :D

You might find it useful.

Right class. Smarten up, sit up straight and listen. John stop fidgetting at the back there.
Now I've told you this before - more than once.
So listen.
It may be a locked .pdf but it is a .pdf of a paper model.
So you must be able to print it.
So print it.
Use the free trial version of Win2pdf from
http://www.win2pdf.com/products/win2pdf.htm
It is the best I have found for this and other design purposes and I use it a lot.
The resultant .pdf file permits use of the "snapshot" tool and is fully editable in vector (and raster) graphics progs..
The extra page of the file in the free trial, which adds a tagline, can be ignored.
You can have an all white airbus if you want.

Disclaimer. As far as I know there is nothing illegal, immoral or carcinogenic in this process.

[wunwinglow]

Yep, what Maurice said. I'm about halfway through cleaning up the file so I can do a similar job, but be warned, the resulting vector file is a complete mess! Duplicate elements, shapes made from unconnected lines with fill patches to cover the gaps, dozens of 'empty' elements (no line weight, no fill, no reason to exist!) curves made of thousands of nodes when three would do perfectly well and so forth. I don't know if this is a product of the conversion to or from pdf, or was how the original design was constructed, but it is desperately inefficient and makes the clean-up process far more time consuming than doing the actual colour rework.

Good luck, but it will be worth it. The final model is very impressive! And being an Airbus, fairly easy to convert to most of the others in the A318/9/20/21 family; just watch where the doors and windows go. The Airbus web site has some very nice comparison drawings to show how the models differ.

Tim

PS Thanks Maurice again for the pointer to win2pdf, it works very well!

[BARX2]

I've never used win2pdf, but I can vouch for a free, open-source PDF program called PDFCreator. Get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

It installs itself as a printer, so when you want to create a PDF file from a document, you just use PDFCreator as your printer and it saves the result as a PDF file. You can then open it and do whatever you like and print it to your printer. I actually use PDFCreator a lot just to save things like receipts for online purchases, rather than printing them on paper.

[Fozzy The Bear]

I've never used win2pdf, but I can vouch for a free, open-source PDF program called PDFCreator. Get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/


I also use PDF Creator.... Being freeware, it kind of suits my mean and tight fisted nature ;) LOL

I can vouch for it too... It's good for me because it works fine under all versions of windows. I run win98 machines as well as XP machines.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[Ashrunner]

As far as I am concerned in the world of repainting, it's basically your's to paint as you see fit...as long as you do not release it after the repaint.

I don't think Canon will have too much of a problem with you showing off your work. There are, as John said, individual designers who do require prior notice. But for the most part, you'll be safe showing your work. If you do get in trouble, let me know and I will do what I can.

Any time you or anyone else wants to repaint and is wondering if its cool or not to show off your work, contact me and I'll give you my opinion. I am not an expert, but I have dealt with some aspects of this in the past.

As for releasing your repaint, should you want to do it, try contacting someone at Canon through the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. It may take a while to get a reply (or it may not), but tell them what you would like to do and you'll probably get an answer.

There might be a problem with the request as the model is a P-model creation, which Canon may have contracted for, or they purchased from P-models. They may not want the kit distributed openly, but if it is good enough, you might want to offer it to them so they can release it through their site.

Good luck on your repaint.

[milenio3]

If can be shown, please do so.

[Gnasher]

That's what I love about this forum, you ask a simple question and you get lots of great advice.

I previously used the GIMP with Ghostscript to sucessfully recolour Epsons letters ( I guess I should have asked the legal question then, I only thought about it now with a complex recolour), so I know that works. The Airbus pdfs can be turned into jpgs using the same method.

Maurice and Tim, you mentioned vector files. What is the advantage of using vector files rather than straight jpgs? I have used Cutepdf a lot to "print" pdfs, so either method (GIMP / Cutepdf) is possible.

This is getting complicated!:eek::) Is there a tutorial/thread somewhere on recolouring?

Gerardo, I think pictures are a long way off!;)

[Gharbad]

Vector files scale up and down perfectly, while jpegs and other standard images don't. They pixelize and lose quality.

[maurice]

Gnasher

I never checked if the file opened in Ghostview - sometimes they do sometimes they don't - I think it depends on the settings.
I'd suggest that if you are not thinking of resizing you could stay with the bitmap/jpg thing in Gimp for this one . The vector file is a bit of a mess to work on but Tim is more knowledgeable than I am on vector "pretty pictures".
Inkscape is the open source vector equivalent of the Gimp.

Tim

I assume you're working in Coreldraw, do you have Canvas installed and have you tried it. My suspicion is that Corel shreds the pdf vector detail more than Canvas.
Yes I know they should be the same but some animals are more equal than others and this seems also to apply to the internal format conversion engines of different programmes.

Hey Fozz

Careful there, people might think you thought I was actually suggesting buying something.:eek: I only mentioned the free trial.:D
Having said that I reckon Win2pdf does a better "technical" job of the conversion than PDF Creator. It also works on Win 98.
I haven't tried printing a trial Win2pdf, minus the tagline page, to Creator.

[Fozzy The Bear]

It also works on Win 98..

The current version won't run or even install on Win98 Maurice. I know because I tried it. Earlier versions may run on Win98 but they're no longer available.

The spec listed by them is:
*********************************************
System Requirements

Pentium-compatible PC.
Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or above, Windows x64, and Windows Server 2003* (If Terminal Services are enabled, the Win2PDF Terminal Server Edition would be required)..
PDF-compatible reader to view the files (see links (http://www.win2pdf.com/company/links.htm) page).We do not support Windows 95, 98, Me, or the Macintosh.
************************************************** **

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[wunwinglow]

Maurice, no, I don't have Canvas, so I can't compare them. As you say, they 'should' be the same, so I haven't looked at other vector programs that might do a better job, 'cos I assumed they'd be as bad!

Gnasher, I just grew up using vector programs, so am much more familiar and comfortable with the way they work. Other get along perfectly well with bitmap software, but the essential difference is the way the components of the image are constructed. With a bitmap, you have a grid of coloured squares, so as you zoom into the detail, the blending your eye does to the tiny spots of colour cannot happen, and you start to see the individual squares, and that looks a bit messy. With a vector format, the shapes, their outlines and filled colours, levels of transparency and so on are stored as mathematical formulae so as you zoom in the image is recreated to suit, so a crisp line stays crisp however close you look at it.

The editting process is also entirely different; if you think of a vector image as a stack of bits of coloured paper, you can select, edit, scale, any of them individually at any time. With a bitmap, you can change the colour of individual, or groups of individual pixels, but they are all essentially independent of each other. More like a painting than a collage...

There are several freebie vector and bitmap programs available, give them a go an see which suites you; some designers use both, as appropriate for the effects they need. Both techniques have their good and bad points!

Tim

[Fozzy The Bear]

There are several freebie vector and bitmap programs available, give them a go an see which suites you; some designers use both, as appropriate for the effects they need. Both techniques have their good and bad points!
Tim

I use both.... It really depends if you plan to rescale a model to make it larger, at a later date.

The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model. While that's not always important, I tend to use a combination of photographic and hand drawn textures, so for me, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop most of all, and draw them at huge resolutions, which mean the model could actually be bigger, and then scale the parts down to the required size afterwards. While keeping the original source material stored at high resolutions for later use.

I guess Adobe Illustrator (vector Program) could do it but I really can't be bothered to spend the time learning it.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[Gnasher]

I am just getting to grips with the GIMP, so I wanted to know whether I should stop and start learning Inkscape!:) The reason I asked was I had a little think about how to go about doing the recolouring and how to match up the lines on the different parts. This will especially difficult with the logo. I was just wondering if it would be easiler in GIMP or Inkscape, and if the technique would be different (so I could choose the easier option of course!).:D)

[wunwinglow]

The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model.(Fozzy The Bear)

Not sure I understand you Fozzie! Corel can import bitmaps into a vector document and they get treated just like any other object more or less, and I am sure there are fill with tiling options, as well as other techniques for filling with patterns, shades and so on.

Blends are another way of creating bitmap-like effects, both by blending the fill within a shape, and blending from one shape to another.

Tim

[CharlieC]

A comment about Inkscape - the developers say it's designed to be a native SVG (scalable vector graphics) editor. It's an outgrowth of an older editor called Sodipodi but tries to strictly implement the SVG standard.

So what's SVG? It's a open vector graphics standard which was intended mostly for Web pages and is a direct competitor to Macromedia Flash. The idea is to have a 2D vector graphic description language which can fit seamlessly into Web pages and to be changed on the fly by other scripting languages like Javascript.

Is it better than Illustrator ? (Gimp is for raster graphic manipulation) - probably not - since the limit of Inkscape capability is governed by the SVG standard - you can do lots in SVG but not everything that a full featured graphics system can do.

I've just finished a project at work using SVG and although it works well it is an absolute pain to find enough information to be able to manipulate the SVG from Web pages. As usual the Microsoft browser doesn't support it
properly.

Regards,

Charlie

[Fozzy The Bear]

Not sure I understand you Fozzie! Corel can import bitmaps into a vector document and they get treated just like any other object more or less, and I am sure there are fill with tiling options, as well as other techniques for filling with patterns, shades and so on.

Blends are another way of creating bitmap-like effects, both by blending the fill within a shape, and blending from one shape to another.

Tim

I think I missworded my original post, when I said "The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model." What I should have said is: you can use photographic textures but that then destroys the scaleability of the vector model, because the bitmaps don't scale well and become pixelated when you try to upscale them.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[maurice]

Tim
Time to question Coreldraw perhaps. I used the trial version to convert a pdf to dxf and the result was of limited value whereas Canvas gave very useable results with the same conversion of the same file.

Julian
Indeed it must have been an earlier version I ran on Win98.
Below is a comparison of your point about the limited scaleability of raster and the full scaleability of vector.
(In fact although the vector looks simple it's a much better representation of the badge as it appears on the ship where it is cut from sheet metal, stuck on the funnel, painted and only meant to be viewed from a distance. :) see inset. )

Charlie
Thanks for the dirt on Inkscape.

Alcides
I humbly suggest you stick with the Gimp on this one.

[wunwinglow]

Maurice, I ran the original file through win2pdf, then opened the resulting pdf in Coreldraw, then saved the file as a Coreldraw file. I can now do exactly what I want with it, once all the duplicates have been cleaned out, and the rest 'rationalised'. I think I have Canvas somewhere on a magazine cover disc, so I will try the same process, I'll let you know what happens. Why did you need a dxf file? The resulting Coreldraw file contains everything I need to recolour the model the way I want it, so I am not sure what you want to do with it that would require dxfing it as well.

Tim

[maurice]

Tim
For this exercise you've done what's needed, although I really will be interested in the result if you can run a Canvas comparison.
But dxf from pdf is a regular thing for me. Converting publicity pdfs of interesting subjects that were obviously just generated direct from the original CAD drawings and which are sometimes A0 sized.
Much simpler than tracing over background raster images.
Not to mention part developments printed from pepa 1.

[wunwinglow]

Maurice, just as a check, have a look at the P51 Old Crow model mentioned today as a free download. I did the win2pdf thing, took a while, but got a pdf that would open in CorelDraw. However, both the original in Acrobat 7, and the processed one appeared to have a cobweb of white lines all over it. Closer inspection, the model is a mesh, and a BIG one! converted so each polygon is a vector shape; Page 4 alone had the best part of half a million elements!! Now that isn't CorelDraw, that is bonkers design!! Clearly this was a mesh model that was opened out one way or another, but to describe a flat set of graphics this way is nuts! I tried tracing around just one of the parts to give a single vector shape, but my poor little PC choked on the data. Can you try it with Canvas and see if you get the same result? I am still looking for that magazine CD....

Tim

[Stev0]

Adobe allows 30 days of unadultered fun with their apps when you download them.

The only problem is that once you have used them ... your hooked.

[Fozzy The Bear]

Adobe allows 30 days of unadultered fun with their apps when you download them.

The only problem is that once you have used them ... your hooked.

This is very true.... I'm kind of lucky in that respect, because I've used them commercially for a lot of years and had them paid for by the work I was doing. So the high cost of the software didn't really matter for me. The thing is that once you use it there's no going back. It's not the industry standard for nothing. It simply is the very best.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[maurice]

Tim
I wasn't going to spend time on that one.
Canvas allowed me to drop the triangles of colour and give me just a solid line outline of just the tailplane from the win2pdf version of p4 before entering an endless loop. It did not enable me to make the same depth of analysis as you got to with Corel.
Looks like a nasty case of infected allergic demented paranoia if you ask me.:) Just inconveniences the user but won't necessarily keep it off z share.
... keep looking for that cd.

[wunwinglow]

Maurice, which version of Canvas are you running? I found the disc, got the installation key and loaded it, version 8.0.6. Since the current version is 10, I am obviously behind the curve! Anyway, can't open any pdfs or cdr files; it says they have unsupported features or are locked. I'll see if I c an't get Corel to save the files in an earlier format...

Tim

[maurice]

Tim
9, bought it in 2004 with the idea of learning vector as well as raster graphics. Have yet to learn vector graphics.;)
But if your's can't open any pdf it's not going to help with my basic enquiry about how coreldraw treats dxf if you have to use corel first to process the file involved.
This is not good news. :)