Small model in a large scene (+ for the instruction sheet)

[Speedster]

Hi all;

This is a departure for me, as most of my work is medical.  I designed a kit for a small On30 narrow gauge "Railbus", that will be manufactured using 3D Printing in the SLA or PolyJet process.  We needed an image for a magazine illustration showing it in context on a model railroad.

So I used a backplate of my own model railroad (I wear a lot of hats as you know!), but ran into a snag properly locating and positioning it in the backplate, as it was so small.

I took the backplate into Photoshop and did a tight crop of the target area, and saved it as a .jpg.  I then used it as a setup backplate.  Even though rather blurred from the crop, I was able to orient the railbus.  I then rendered only the railbus as a .png with alpha.  Then I worked up a comp, using the .png over the actual image, sizing it to suit.

Not perfect, but OK for the small magazine illustration.

Anyway, a neat trick!  Would be great if we could zoom (not dolly) into a scene for this purpose, where it would also zoom the backplate. Like a magnifying glass common to many CAD apps.  Be a great help in setup!

Bill G

[Speedster]

"Studio" shot for advertising...
Bill G

[Esben Oxholm]

Hi Bill.

On mac you can zoom 'into' the screen by holding CMD while scrolling. Maybe there is some equivalent for windows if you use that?
I imagine that will do the trick you are asking for, if I understand the problem correctly.

Best,

[Speedster]

Well, I tried, but there does not appear to be a similar function on the PC.  But thanks!
Bill G

[Speedster]

For the instruction sheet...
Bill G

[mattjgerard]

This sort of functionality is avaialbe via 3rd party apps, but its not going to do much good, as the scaling frankly sucks past 100%. My sister in law is a blind rehabilitationist, and is familiar with all the screen enlargement apps out there for PC, and they all stink according to her. OSX atually handles scaling internally, and most of their interface objects are vector based so they scale nicely. But that doesn't mean the contents of the windows inside KS will behave properly. That scaling will still ahve to happen within KS.

So, yes, that would be a great feature, the magnifying glass option. Or, in todays FPS gaming parlance, "scoping" where hitting the shift key pops the camera POV through the weapons' scope system thereby magnifying distant object for the perfect shot. Something like that could possibly be implemented here, internally like a duplicated camera with a longer lens. Maybe internally KS duplicates the camera, presenting just one to the user, but doubles the lens length and only accessible by a shortcut? Wonder if there is a way to do this already by linking two cameras and using the switch camera shortcut?

Interesting concept.

Hi Bill.

On mac you can zoom 'into' the screen by holding CMD while scrolling. Maybe there is some equivalent for windows if you use that?
I imagine that will do the trick you are asking for, if I understand the problem correctly.

Best,

[Josh3D]

This is wonderful Bill! Thanks for the breakdown and detail.

[nicordf]

That´s a crazy detailed model Bill! Good one!