I needed to make some yummies for my dog. I have a silicone mold tray (looks like the bubble popping fidget toy but is bigger) and wanted a way to scrape the backs flat. The mold not only has divots, but raised lines in between, so a regular spatula wouldn’t work - I needed a spatula with fingers.
I pulled out my ruler and quickly found that today was not the day to deal with the fiddling small fractions.
I lined up a ruler and took a picture, knowing that parallax was going to be an issue.
I put the image in Affinity Designer and lined up the ruler in the photo to the grid in Affinity.
I made one good box the size that I needed it to be, ignoring all of the others that have annoying parallax.
I then copied the box so that I had 5 guessing that would be the size that I wanted.
Affinity has a feature that lets you spread items evenly over a distance, in my case 4". This should allow the right size for the dividers.
I created a trapezoid that looked like it would be the right size to be comfortable to use.
Affinity has a Shape Builder that will let you build one shape from many.
Save as an SVG then off to the Forge.
The size was perfect!
This is a very niche tool, but I thought you might find my process useful.
Speaking of parallax, I have an app on my iPhone called Scanner Pro. (There are probably dozens of similar apps available). It acts like a copy machine with an additional nice feature—it corrects wonkiness in the scan and I end up with perfectly straight proportions. It would probably work great for this application, although your solution is great too!
Working with photos can definitely simplify the design process! A nice easy way to combat parallax is to take your picture from further away; I generally set my target on the floor and take the picture while standing above it. Bonus points if you stand on a chair.
That corrects for skew, not parallax. Slightly different.
The scanner app is a good idea though. Skew is a pain to correct.
As for parallax you can’t exactly eliminate it but taking the image from farther away with zoom will minimize it, and putting your ruler right on top of your measured object should make it irrelevant.
That’s the best thing about the GF - making stuff that is a one of a kind for personal needs. Thanks for sharing not only the design, but the steps you did to make it.
