An industry that has absolutely exploded over the past decade is vehicle wraps. If you go our driving, you will see vehicles with either partial or full wraps. Did you realize that it is very easy to create the artwork for vehicle wraps in CorelDRAW? For those who truly want to do it themselves, you can get detailed measurements of each area of the vehicle and create your own template. The rest of you will want to use a template where someone has already done that hard work for you.

Vehicle templates were supplied with CorelDRAW X4 though their usefulness was very limited since keywords were not included in the files to indicate the make, model and year. Users who really wanted to search hard might be able to find the template they needed, but the search could be time consuming. CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 has improved the situation dramatically. In Corel’s promotional information, they advertise the inclusion of over 2000 vehicle templates. During Corel’s Webinar (you can still attend one of the future Webinars), they said that the vehicle templates included with CorelDRAW X5 included keywords for both make and model. What surprised me a bit was that they said the year wasn’t included.

I decided to do a little bit of research myself to see what I would find. I used the popular ROMCat utility to search the CorelDRAW X5 keyword catalog for what I felt were some of the vehicles most commonly wrapped. If I didn’t search on the model you want to know about, you can certainly get your copy of ROMCat and search for that model yourself.

The first search was for the Cadillac Escalade. Five templates were returned by the search. Two templates included 2002, one included 2003 and two included 2007 (one of them is shown at right). So my immediately reaction was surprise since some of them did indeed include years.

Then I searched for the Smart car. Four templates were returned. Of those, two included 2007 and two had no year. My next search was for the VW Beetle and three of them were found. Two of the templates had no year and one had 2005. The last search was for the Toyota Prius and it found two templates. One of them had 2000 as a keyword and one had no years included.

After these searches I came to the conclusion that for artists who are not in the vehicle wrap business, you might be able to find the template you need should the occasion arise. Those who are creating wraps on a regular basis will probably be frustrated that they can’t find the exact year they need or even the vehicle.

For those who need more templates, there is a solution! Corel licensed the included templates from the folks at MR-Clipart and their full collection includes more than 80,000 templates! No, this collection isn’t included with CorelDRAW, you’ll have to buy it separately. Yet it is extremely valuable to those who need these templates on a regular basis. Want to know what is included? You’ll find a search on the product page where you can search among all of the included templates. The collection also includes a year of downloadable updates. That way if a new template is completed, you can download it when needed. You’ll also see that there are 3D templates available. These are really cool because you can design in 2D for output to your wide format printer in CorelDRAW. Before output, simply export the design to a JPG file and the included 3D software will create a 3D rendering of the finished vehicle that you can fully rotate. Or take a photo of the customer’s building and place the 3D rendering right in their parking lot so they can picture it before you wrap it. Not only does this allow you to get it just right before printing the wraps, it also can be a great sales tool to close the deal!