Page 1 of 1

Tutorial for proper scaling in Paint net

Posted: January 15th, 2018, 12:04 pm
by Gollevainen
As there has been around some quite colorfull ways how people approach the mathematichs of SB, in paint.net and other advanced programs, I decided to do this little tutorial to show how it should be done.
Offcourse this is the only rigth way ;)

Step 1

Find the correct length of the object you are drawing. Wikipedia is used in this examble, but be aware, the usuall method would include douple and triple checking it from various sources. Expensive books and so on...
Image

Step 2
now, we have 6760mm or 6,760m length for a truck in FD scale which is 1m = 22.093 pixels
Simply multibly 6,76x22,093 and you will get 149,34868, thats how many pixels its length would be in FD scale.

Step 3
Image

Now, measure the same length in your source drawing, and in here we get 192 pixels. The size of the source and ammount of pixel haze makes this part the most important, specially the smaller your source picture is and the bigger the scale coefficient is.

now, divide your desired pixel length with this measure and you get: 0,777857708 which is the ratio your picture needs to be resized to get the lenght of the truck correctly scaled
Just multibly the width of the whole picture with that ratio and you will get 622,2861667, which is how many pixels the source picture needs to be to fit the truck in correct scale.

Now, the Paint.net and no one else is not going to get any more accurate in the scale than 1 pixel at this point (plus naturally the all past errors that multibly themselves in the previous phases). Use normal rounding rules, and thus in this case we set it in 622 pixels.

Step 4.
Image
Now rezise the picture. In this case we came up with 150 pixels in the actuall scaling, so most likely the error is in the selection meassurument, or in the source drawing not beeing straigth. +/-1 pixel is around best we can get, so I wouldnt go changing that any more
Its now done, and now you can copy/paste the needed part to an different layer and crop it as much you want and/or do what ever your modus operanti with the layers/templates is. I myself would copy the simple truck into my paint worksheets and only after its completed, i would Place it on templates, but thats up to everyone's own choises now.

Re: Tutorial for proper scaling in Paint net

Posted: January 24th, 2018, 5:39 am
by TimothyC
One further suggestion is that one should make the source image size a multiple of the size of the item you are re-scaling. For example, if I have an image of a ship that is 452 pixels long, I would want the 'canvas size' in PdN to be 904 or 1356 or 1808. If I picked say, 1356, and the ship was 212 feet long, I would want to make the re-scaled image 1272 pixels wide.

Re: Tutorial for proper scaling in Paint net

Posted: February 13th, 2018, 12:52 am
by khouji
Thanks for sharing Gollevainen! ;)

Re: Tutorial for proper scaling in Paint net

Posted: November 25th, 2023, 12:51 pm
by Gollevainen
Its time to give a another imput to this tutorial, basicly covering the same method, but now with ship, and bit more to what comes to overally use and scale the references.

I thought, i choose straigthfoward reference, but I noticed some issues on it that rose during making this, but I decided to continue, as they highlight some of the things one needs to
take consideration in our special little hobby. And also, this time my paint.net was in finnish settings, so bit of a language tutorial as well, as it used to be cool to larp finnish atleast few years ago in our discord server :)

The reference file, i used can be found in http://dreadnoughtproject.org/plans/KM_ ... hiff_1938/

Image
Image
Image
Image

Re: Tutorial for proper scaling in Paint net

Posted: December 1st, 2023, 2:43 pm
by reytuerto
Hi, G. Thanks a lot! If appears much more precise with pixels than using % scaling. Cheers.

PS: May I suggest move the template (the ruler scale) to the right, so the flag and the flagstaff (specially if the flagstaff is very leaned, proyecting well over the stern) will have enough space.