Correct Scale
I have a decal which I have designed in illustrator for a bottle design and saved out as .PNG.
The decal is meant to be 30mm tall. My bottle is 55mm tall.
I need to know how to import the decal so it is the absolute correct size on the bottle.
Simple enough you would think. However if I take the advice from other posts and make the decal 30px it comes out very low res.
And even then in imports not really at correct scale. I can manually scale it but that is not very precise.
What is the best tested and true way to get the decal to appear in its actual correct size at hi enough res that it does not look pixelated.
Perhaps I could use a different tool, but I actually just want to place it as a label.
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by lqg5960. Go to Solution.
Solved by martin.spengler. Go to Solution.
In case this helps, I do not set priority for new feature development. Thanks for all your replies, I'll be sure to update the improvement ticket to note the recent feedback.
Sorry, the feeling shut down part of that was not directed at this thread per-say, just as a note on how I have seen other interactions go.
I feel people forget that everyone starts at the beginning and have different means of learning, needs, and work pressures.
Overall I feel those that contribute do try to help others as best they can.
The appearance work around is long winded, it does not really solve the problem that the Decal feature is not really functional. So who ever said they solved the problem.... I would say that is not the case.
What are you trying to design that requires precision decal? Can you share any images or designs?
The reason I'm asking is because with information such as: what industry you are in, what sort of designs need this, how difficult is the workaround, what is the overall impact to the quality of the model the customer is able to produce, etc. it will make more sense when asking for resources to redo the decal command.
Thanks for helping show what a strong case there is for prioritizing this customer requested improvement.
Just read the post from the beginning. Autodesk has all the information needed to fix this thing.
No, it’s not thé same.
using appearance use « projection » to place thé texture.
Decal is closer to a réal texture mapping with UV unwrapped in quite a realistic way
but without any “parametric” value to scale and transform it. Only by the “eye”
You are so right in that point.
I myself have posted several times here on this topic over the YEARS.
Yes its been years, not just a couple, or a few, its old enough to have entered 3rd grade already.
Autodesk clearly cares as about its customers as every other monopolistic software company, or aircraft (Boeing).
I remember when the customer was valued, not scorned or ignored.
It's the customers right to expect and demand excellence.
Its expected from me on a daily basis from my clients.
I wonder where our company would be if we treated our customers like this.
If they did care, they'd add hands to the project, not like they don't have the resources or historical code base to draw from.
I believe it boils down to Autodesk not wanting it to compete too closely with Inventor.
There are too many BS work arounds.
I'm not a bot.
I don't set priority for feature development.
The experience I showed in message 89 is exactly what I would show you in response to your question, and is the accepted workaround by more than one customer on this thread.
I understand what you want, to place a decal without having to scale it. That is not possible today, and will not be for a while. But for you and all readers, please don't jump to ad hominem attacks about what Autodesk cares about. There are 14k of us, and only some work on Fusion. This is just not on the list of priorities right now, and I'm sorry that hurts you, but it's not going to change by insulting developers who also do not set priority for new features.
I'll open the ticket again and mention that it's important to you. I will also remind the PM for design that customers want to place decals without scaling them. That's all I can do for you at this time.
Just to clarify, it is not that we want to place decals without scaling them.
Quite the opposite we want the Decal to respect scale and be able to scale the decal accurately.
Using guides, or using appearance are long winded work arounds. Sure they can work, but they take way longer.
Why have a decal button, if it does not actually do what it's meant to do.
Case studies are packaging.
Here are some samples of some of the use cases.
And honestly Post 89 is not very efficient. I count about 5 operations (Create sketch, draw rectangle, *apply dimensions*, split face, decal, then move and scale it around) and about 15 clicks vs if decal worked properly; 1 operation and about 4 clicks for doing it with a correctly functioning decal tool.
See message 66 which gives lots of ideas for how this could be acheived.
This is a long one, but I hope this can be a comprehensive explanation of what we want and why it's absurd that we have to ask for it.
To ensure there are no misunderstandings, "Just to clarify, it is not that we want to place decals without scaling them" could be misleading. We do want to be able to place decals and have them start at the same scale and size as their image so as not to have to scale them. But we also want to be able to scale them accurately.
When you manipulate and export an image, its size is embedded into it, commonly in the form of resolution in pixel width and height plus the pixel density in the form of pixels per inch or per centimeter. Also, despite being infinitely scalable, SVGs are usually made in a workspace with set dimensions and are exported at their specific size. When imported, the user expects them to start at that size, unless the user otherwise specified somehow, such as something like a "fit" option.
User interfaces should be analogous to other familiar and similar interfaces. These are the things that the general user expects it to be analogous to for minimal frustration, as well as the things it needs to have to be useful. (The following also should apply to the canvas and, to some extent, the import SVG features)
Some of these ways I'm going to go over you already have covered, but there are some expected functions here that you are missing, which would be nice to have, and some that you need to have. You should take note of them.
The Sketch interface.
It's assumed that it would behave very similarly to the way basic interactions with a rectangle in sketches work, albeit with a somewhat simplified workflow. It's expected that, like a rectangle, you can freely stretch it from its edges or dimension its sides to a specific known value number. With rectangles, you can constrain its edges, middle of its edges, corners, or midpoint to other geometry or have an offset to those points. When you move any of its points on top of other geometry, it automatically applies a coincident constraint. Or, if you remove the horizontal/vertical constraint, you can rotate it from any point freely, or dimension it to a specific angle (sometimes this requires you to constrain the point you want to rotate it about). It's a parametric modeling app; it's expected that you can use hard parameters to define it.
I think users expect also expect that you at least could draw a rectangle in a sketch, and then when you place the decal, you are given the option to have it automatically fit to the rectangle (or face) you click on. If you wanted to go the extra mile, also give an option for the rectangle (or face) to instead act like a bounding box that crops the image non-destructively similar to how photo editing apps work, that would be awesome.
However, the decal is also an image; it's expected that you can interact with it in the basic ways that you can in nearly every software that lets you place and edit a photo.
Adobe Illustrator:
This, and other similar apps, are where many people will be coming from with their custom decals. You can align and snap the photo to other existing objects by their edges, center, and corners (just like sketches!.... but not in decals....). You can grab an edge and rotate or scale it freely (Just like sketches... but you can only do it from the center in decals). You can input specific widths or lengths individually like you would dimensioning it in sketches (like you can in sketches... but not in decals...). You can set a specific angle via a text field, with options to rotate from the corners, center edges, or center (like you can do via sketches if you constrain things right. You can only do this around the center in decals). Also, you can lock and unlock the width/height fields to change whether one dimension scales proportionally to the other without doing any of the math yourself (not in sketches per se, but a crucial photo editing feature). You can flip the image horizontally/vertically with a button (You have this in decals, nice!). You can control the opacity (You have this, nice!). You can specify a coordinate Y/X distance based on the origin (this could be based on the center/origin of whatever face/plane you selected to place the decal on).
Let's look at another example that you aren't going to design the image in; only place it: Google Slides.
Yes, there is more expectation of visual design here, so we see other options like recolor, brightness/contrast, drop-shadow, etc. However, Fusion has the same expectation of layout control, so we see that Google Slides lets you do the same as Illustrator as mentioned above; aside from that, it is missing the ability to rotate from anything other than the center, and once rotated, corners only snap to edges, and not other corners. A lot of the same goes for Powerpoint, Photoshop, Gimp, DaVinci Resolve, and even MS Paint, etc. Every basic built-in photo editing app on every device pretty much at least has the ability to control the images like that "Size & Rotation" panel.
To illustrate how intrinsic the ability to grab a photo's edges and change it to a known size is, even this forum interface lets you do so, albeit not with a way to type the number in. The same goes for many email clients and word processors. It is beyond absurd that you cannot do this.
I cannot stress enough how awkward and less useful it is that it is not analogous to either of those things, especially regarding alignment relative to existing objects and setting to a specific, known size instead of only a relative one. It is incredibly jarring and weird that it is not because this is the expected behavior of every app that deals with photo editing and every app that lets you do any form of parametric modeling.
If we design a decal/canvas at a specific size and/or want it to go into a specific space aligned to a specific thing... We can't... We just have to eyeball it. Why?
Regardless of how important or unimportant the Fusion development team thinks accuracy dimensions and placement is with this feature is (accuracy and geometric/numeric definability in placement is literally why people model parametrically, it's what makes it parametric), I think it's clear to say this feature is an utter failure in its user interface.
Solution 1 could not work in all the cases.
using appearance works only for an image placed on a single face.
if you have a more complex shape with multiple faces as you don’t have UV unwrap feature it don’t works.
the good thing with Decal is the projection on the true surface and the image which can flow from one face to the other continuously. Like on a cube with round corner/edges…
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