With vehicle wraps becoming more popular, it makes good sense to find ways to speed up the estimating, designing and presentation processes. Vehicle templates are essential tools to help make wraps projects more efficient right from the start. How you use the template is up to you, but they can be helpful every step of the way—from sketching and measuring to designing and presentation. Let’s look at a few vehicle template packages and then I’ll show you how you can create a custom template for your customer’s actual vehicle.

 

DIGITAL DESIGNWARE

Two prominent template software companies, Digital Auto Library and MR Clipart, recently joined forces to become Digital Designware. Through this merger they offer a very extensive collection of vehicle templates. Digital Designware offers two different template packages: ProVehicle Outlines and the Car’n Truck collection. 

 

ProVehicle Outlines includes more than 12,000 templates as well as 5,000 3-D templates for use in 3-D software. European and Asian collections in addition to their North American collection of templates are available through ProVehicle Outlines. Both an online service and a DVD option, complete with 300-plus page printed manual, are also available.

 

The Car’n Truck collection includes more than 12,000 files that represent 70,000 templates, as well as 4,500 3-D models and a full featured 3-D software. The Car’n Truck collection goes beyond SUV’s, cars, trucks and vans. It also includes templates for big rigs, aircraft, motorbikes, boats, jet skis, trains and emergency vehicles.

 

Art Station offers a template collection as well as a very handy wrap dimensions collection that speeds up the quoting process.

The 3D option in both collections allows you to take a flat 2-D design and create a 3-D representation for use during the proofing process. Digital Designware boasts accurate templates that allow you to print directly from the template.

 

While working with the customer, important information and ideas can be sketched onto paper printouts of the templates. Printouts of final designs, laid out on the templates, can also be used to help the installers place the graphics.

 

The purchase price of either collection includes 12 months of unlimited downloads of new templates. New templates are released weekly. Visit www.digitaldesignware.com for more information.

 

THE BAD WRAP

The Bad Wrap vehicle template software collection contains more than 320 vehicles that span more than 1,500 model years. This product utilizes raster photographic images rather than scalable vector-based templates. Each template is built from a high-resolution photograph, and each is meticulously measured to be accurate within a quarter inch.

 

I spoke with Stephanie Stamm, with SA International (SAi), about The Bad Wrap and some of its features. Stamm states that “The Bad wrap is an excellent presentation tool. Designers can drag and drop any graphic onto the template for the fastest, most life-like preview possible.” 

 

Stamm also talked about the time saving benefits of The Bad Wrap, and how this efficiency can boost profits. “The Bad Wrap lets wrap artists focus on the fun part of the job—the design and application—rather than the tedious work of measuring the vehicle. The time and cost savings associated with using The Bad Wrap templates will boost a shop’s profits and help them stay competitively priced.”

 

Ease of use is another factor in efficiency. Stamm explained that each file in The Bad Wrap collection is a layered TIFF file that can be manipulated in Photoshop or FlexiSIGN-PRO 10. 

 

According to Stamm, “It’s ridiculously easy to drag and drop graphics onto the template.” Minimal Flexi or Photoshop experience is needed to easily design and edit using the templates. A separate layer allows the designs to be proofed with or without perforated window film.

 

The Bad Wrap vehicle templates span auto manufacturing years 1987 through 2011 (2012 templates still in development), and also include a collection of boat templates. The entire collection (or individual templates) can be purchased online at SAi’s online store. Visit http://sign.com/Automotive_Suite356.asp for more information. 

 

The Bad Wrap templates are built from high-resolution photographs for a more realistic presentation.

ART STATION VEHICLE TEMPLATES

I also had the pleasure of speaking with Larry Lopez of Art Station Vehicle Templates. According to Lopez, the collection has “over 5,000 vector-based vehicle templates accurately drawn for the vehicle wraps industry.” 

 

The templates are labeled with the manufacturing year and specifics of the vehicle model; and most templates include a five-sided view of each vehicle. Some of the templates also include an undistorted rear window shape to eliminate perspective issues on final prints.

Each template is saved in multiple vector formats and can be easily imported into almost any vector program. The templates can be edited if necessary and are accurate within a quarter inch. 

 

Lopez takes the vehicle templates a step further with their Wrap Dimensions Reference Guide. As Lopez explains, “the guide allows you to give a quote for a wrap job quickly and easily by having all the measurements available at your fingertips. Getting the numbers you need together, to get the job in the first place, is one hurdle no one has really addressed.” Quickly turning around a quote by having the measurements already taken, can give your company a leg-up over the competition.

 

There are almost 300 unique templates of the most popularly wrapped vehicles. Each of the templates has the dimensions clearly marked on the template with both U.S. Standard and Metric measurements, and total square feet / meters clearly noted. The square footage includes waste and bleeds for accurate quoting and cost control. The total square footage for window film is also included allowing you to easily price perforated window film separately.

 

Individual vehicle templates can be downloaded online at http://artstation-vehicletemplates.com, or the complete set is available on DVD.

 

These vehicle templates from Digital Designware can be used for sketching, measuring, designing and presentation.

CUSTOM TEMPLATES

Templates are always handy to have for quotes and for the sketching and note taking process, but some shops may prefer to use the customer’s actual vehicle for the design and presentation process. There are good ways to create your own templates based on your customer’s physical vehicle. This is also helpful for creating accurate wraps on unique or highly modified vehicles.

 

Sign Magic offers a tutorial that can be purchased and downloaded off their site at www.wrapmagic.com. The tutorial includes step-by-step instructions and screen shots of the process of creating your own custom vehicle template. 

 

The information is in a PDF document with more than 60 pages. The report takes you through the whole process starting with a photo of the vehicle and turning it into a custom, photographic template.

 

In my shop we use a similar process. We currently use the ProVehicle Outlines templates for sketching, measuring and note taking, but the template we use for designing and presentation is custom created from photos of our customer’s vehicle.

 

This may seem like it’s a time-consuming process, but the more often you do it, the faster it is to create the templates. Working with photos of the actual vehicle to be wrapped also allows you to note problem areas, obstacles or other issues you may have otherwise missed.

 

HOW TO: CUSTOM VEHICLE TEMPLATES

Here’s a summarized break-down of how I create custom vehicle wrap templates for our shop using a digital camera and Photoshop:

 

1) Start by taking straight-on photos of the vehicle. To do this stand at the mid-point of the side, back or front of the vehicle and take a straight-on photo. If it’s a small vehicle, squat down so you’re not shooting down on it.

 

2) Using a rough sketch of the vehicle, a vehicle template, or printout of the vehicle photos, take a few reference measurements of each side of the vehicle. Measure areas that will appear undistorted in the photos. Be sure to get a top-to-bottom measurement, including the curve of the vehicle, as well as a side-to-side measurement of the entire length of the vehicle.

 

3) Import the photos into Photoshop and straighten the photos if necessary. Crop the photo down leaving extra room around the vehicle. The extra unnecessary space on the photo will just increase the file size without benefiting the resolution of the design.

 

4) At this point I usually save a high-resolution working Photoshop file. Then I flatten and reduce the size and save a lower resolution JPEG and label it for each side. I find it easier to size the photos in FlexiSign, so I import the low res JPEGs into one page in Flexi. I scale the photo by drawing reference boxes for the measurements I took. 

 

Three or four good measurements of each side is usually enough to ensure your accuracy. If you scale the photo and each of those measurements matches, then you’re good. I like to scale all sides of the vehicle on one page in Flexi and save that file as a “scaled photos” file. It’s good for reference during the design process.

 

5) At this point if you plan to do a wrap with all vector-based artwork you can keep the scaled photos in Flexi, Corel or Adobe Illustrator and do your layouts in the vector-based program using masking tools.

 

6) Now the low-res photos that were scaled are the same cropped photos as the high resolution ones I saved in Photoshop. I now have my photos accurately sized so I simply change the Image Size in Photoshop to match my scaled size. I then lower the resolution to a workable size. Depending on the overall size of the vehicle, a bus or large trailer may need to start larger, I’ve found that 50 MB or so before you’ve start adding any layers is more than enough to get nice clean images. Keep in mind that wraps are meant to be viewed 10 feet back and overly large file sizes are time-consuming to work with.

 

7) My photo is now straight and sized. Keeping one photo of the vehicle in the background, I create another copy on top of it. Turn off the view of the background layer. Go to the top layer, and using the Polygonal Lasso tool, start outlining the areas of the vehicle that will have graphics on them and delete them. 

 

You can carefully go around obstacles like door handles and windows, keeping them in the photo for reference, but I’ve found that often it’s easier to delete large sections that will be wrapped first. Then, copy the background layer again and on this layer keep the obstacles and delete everything else.

 

8) If the windows are to be wrapped with a perforated window film, they can also be placed on their own layer. During the presentation I usually set this layer to about 15 percent opacity to show the slight difference from perforated film to regular wrap film.

 

9) Label your layers as you go.

 

10) Your obstacles, windows and vehicle outline should remain at the top with the original photo in the background. Do all your designing in between these layers. This allows you to extend your graphics out beyond the vehicle without masking as you go. 

 

The graphics should always be extended past the actual vehicle, with important information kept away from the edges of the vehicle and away from obstacles. When the final graphics are setup for printing you should include at least an extra 3-4" all the way around.

 

11) Since I’m designing on separate layers in between it’s easy to move photos and images around, add-in new information and add effects to separate layers.

 

12) To present a proof to the customer I simply flatten my file, after saving it, and reduce the image size and resolution to around 4 MB or so. The image is saved as either a JPEG or PDF and is emailed to the customer for approval of the layout. For final color approval we print a cropped section of the actual graphics and print them at full resolution.

 

13) When everything has been approved I take my layered Photoshop file and pull down guidelines to mark approx. 3-4" out from the vehicle to give me that extra material. 

 

Here’s another trick to be sure you’re getting enough (but not too much) overlap: take the overall size of the wrapped area, top to bottom, left to right, add your extra inches and then create a new file in Photoshop at that size, making sure the resolution size is the same as your working file. Copy and paste this box and drop it into your working file. Lower the opacity of that level so you can see your graphics through the box, and use this outline area to line up your guidelines.

 

14) Once you have your guidelines set, delete the box (if you did that) and turn off the ‘Layer Visibility’ on any top layers that won’t be printed, including the obstacles, windows and outline. You can turn off the bottom layer too. 

 

15) Using the guidelines and Photoshop’s Rectangular Tool, draw a box that fits the guidelines.

 

16) Crop your image to this size.

 

17) Flatten your image down to one layer. This is you final print file. Save it for printing.

Presenting your vehicle wrap design on the customer’s actual vehicle gives them a very accurate idea of what the final print will look like. In the end, that’s what the customer will be most concerned with. Vehicle outlines, whether purchased or custom made, are essential tools in the wrap design process.