How to make machine icons for AutoCadabra

Each user of AutoCADABRA has a virtual garage where his cars are stored. The developers of the project ( Thematic Media ) turned to us ( Turbomilk ) with a difficult task - to draw icons for all cars in the world. But not simple icons, but “repainted” so that users can choose any color for their car.


As a rule, the size of the icons within the same set is the same, but real cars have different sizes and we had to decide how to display it. At first, we thought about dividing the machines into classes and introducing a fixed length in pixels for each class. But then they decided to use a more accurate system - to draw on a scale. We took 60 millimeters of the length of a real car for 1 pixel of the length of the icon. Thus, in order to get the length of the icon, it was necessary to measure the real car and divide the resulting value by 60.



So that the cars could be easily repainted, we had to come up with a special drawing technology. First, the contour of the car is drawn, and then black shadows and white highlights are placed on top. It turns out here is such a translucent machine:



If you put such a picture on top of a colored background, then the car magically repaints in the color of this background:



At the moment, icons are drawn for most of the cars popular in Russia. They decorate virtual garages and delight users of AutoCadabra. Here are just a small part of the total number of car icons: