For a while now I have been wanting to take a shot from one of Lucasarts SCUMM games and redraw it to give it a sharper look, rather than just scaling it. Incidentally I have been wanting to try doing a bit of artwork in vanilla Autocad, even though it is designed for general drafting and not for artworks, I wanted to give it a go.
The big advantage with Autocad is that it is a vector based program, so no matter how big or small I decide to draw the subject, it is a simple process of using the publishing properties to scale the image to the output size I want, or I can use the scale command in model space to increase its size to whatever. Due to it being vector based no matter how big I scale it, lines will stay crisp unlike a raster drawing where pixellation will become an issue.
What Autocad isn't very good for is free hand drawing, as there are no commands built in to go silly. You can use a spline to get plenty of curves, but that is a difficult and is not practical to use, so I was limited to using primitive lines and arcs to establish what I wanted. Colour is also a bit of an issue as it doesn't have a greatly robust colouring commands at the helm, but for what it has I can do some easy hatching to establish the colours that I need. Although what shows on the screen and what is published is another story and I will need to do some work to ensure that the darkness of the colours isn't too heavy.
Anyway here is my first draft and first ever attempt at using Autocad to produce a replica from one of my favourite games of all time: Full Throttle. It isn't complete yet as it needs colour correction, and some primative line tweaking, but for my first try I am fairly happy. Attached is the reference screen shot, the lines, the hatchings in model space and the final .png product.
reference image
http://i30.tinypic.com/frynp.jpg - primitive lines
http://i29.tinypic.com/2mouujt.jpg - colour hatching
Final product.