Sunday, May 10, 2015

resource recommendations - Where can I find vectors / blueprints of different car models (vinyl design)?


I need to design a vinyl for Seat Ibiza Coupe (2009).


I have already found this site: the-blueprints.com but I think it is too expensive for a vector.


Is there any site that has free or unexpensive vectors or blueprints of cars?


I am actually looking for something like this:



enter image description here



Answer



In general there are two big crowds doing vector drawings. Designers and engineers. Now engineers do not in general call their drawings vector drawings. But rather they would call them CAD files, layout drawings etc etc. They are never refereed to as vector drawings although that's what they are (mainly because several CAD software predate vector drawing software for graphic design by a safe margin of a decade or so).


Engineers are also doing planning work and often need to refer to external resources. It is therefore likely that technical products like cars can be found as CAD files. Indeed almost certainly the car manufacturer has very detailed drawings of each and every part. So some engineers have access to the real deal. For example I have near full 3D drawings for a older Chevy Corvette sitting on my hard drive (the file kills my hard drive tough so opening it takes about my entire lunch-break). So in parallel its good to add the terms:



  • CAD,

  • DWG,

  • DXF,

  • IGES,

  • STEP,



to your search criteria instead of vector and blueprint (blueprints haven't been used for decades you know, and as far as I know engineers do not tend to call these things blueprints). Most likely many of the files are actually derived trough some of these sources. Due to the nature of the files these are often in scale but naturally there's no guarantee. Certainly in this case goggling for a source yields at least one passable dwg file that opens without problems in illustrator.


Please note technical drawings do not have any standard copyright protections as they are usually thought of as facts like a phone book. Although this can be a bit murky, but certainly and drawing that's gone to manufacturing is just that a list of design facts.


A second source of drawings can be found in technical sales material certainly you can find this car as a vector form is one of these materials. Some are converted to pixels but i managed to find at least one source with a vector drawing in the sales material.


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