Graphic-illustration-type project aided by Summasketch III

[Elden and Ivirose Green]

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am preparing to do a 2D illustration project in Autocad Map R2. The end
result will be a pieced-together (or one-piece, depending on byte-size) 3'
X 12'
full-color hardcopy plotted on an HP750C Inkjet. The two hurdles I must
jump are these:
1. I think I need a stylus-type digitizer board to incorporate bits and
pieces of my graphics into my illustration. I can also use this stylus
to sketch with. I own a Summasketch III 12" X 12" with a four-button
puck. Will the factory stylus that I can purchase be of sufficient
"fineness" to allow me to produce a fine art illustration? If not, what
should I do?

2. As a palette for fine art, I am very disappointed in the Autodesk
256 color palette. I need the ability to produce many more gradations,
especially by lighten-ing the tones of the existing colors. Can anyone
enlighten me (pun intended!)?

Any info here would be appreciated!

Elden Green
Day 304-436-4195
Eve. 304-436-6421

[Mark McDonough]

One of the long standing shortcomings of AutoCAD is that it's built-in RGB
palette of 256 colors. There is nothing you can do about that. The colors
are dark, deeply saturated colors, not the light or pastel shades Architects
and Landscape Architects like to use. A couple years ago, frustrated by
this limitation (all the while the Microstation users could plot in any 16.5
million RGB shades) I wrote a utility to extend AutoCAD access to 16.5
million colors for AutoCAD users. It allows creation of simple RGB template
files, containing any RGB colors you want, which get applied to standard
AutoCAD postscript plot files.

It wasn't an easy task... one of the larger, more complex lisp programs I've
written. Also, since we use Soft Engine... an enhanced video driver
interface for AutoCAD which allows interactive mixing of screen RGB colors,
I wrote a link to the SoftEngine interface to "dump" the screen colors to
the plot. Its bidirectional, so it'll "import" custom colors back to the
screen, so that its WYSIWG.

Knowing what colors to select and what RGB (red green blue) values to input
is always a problem, so I wrote a palette generator, looking something like
the CHROMA drawing, but with the color index notated on each color patch,
and the corresponding RGB value notaed as well. The palette generator asks
for a "starting RGB value", an increment or decrement value for red, green
and blue, then updates the color and text for each color patch with the
written RGB value. It was then possible to quickly and effortlessly explore
literally thousands of colors, with their respective RGB values written out,
and plot these palettes for our CAD users to use as reference. I created
palettes exploring subtle shades of brick reds, or ivy greens for Landscape,
etc.

I believe there are other products out there that do something similar to
this. At the time I wrote this, there was only 1 major viable add-on that
gave similar functionality, and at +-2K per license, I wasn't prepared to
disk out that much for 50 concurrent licenses. I notice that McNeel &
Associates has an enhanced driver package (very inexpensive), that I believe
gives access to other colors. There are other affordable packages as well.

Mark McDonough
mmcdo...@sasaki.com
http://www.sasaki.com

Elden and Ivirose Green wrote in message
<01be3157$f8f6eb40$48e9adcf@oemcomputer>...
>Dear Sir or Madam: