some importing help please

[kevinsmithrn]

Hello,

I have just purchased the carvewright system and have enjoyed using it - however I am having a little trouble with importing jpegs and ending up with the desired product. It seems when I import a drawing I end up with noise that I just cant get rid of... I recently bought a very well defined very detailed pattern of ducks flying designed for wood carvers (not carvewright) anyway my first carving took 6 hours or so...it was full of detail... so I fooled around with paint and erased out most of the detail... but i'm ending up with an image that has dimples and holes.... and am having very little sucess with outlining the pattern... what I wish to do is to have most of the lines routed and not carved... I am placing this image on an 30" x 5 1/2 board. I think if you guys can give me a hand and tell me what I'm doing wrong I can expand the information to my other jpegs and projects... I am uploading a file ofthe picture that I am tryingto import...

thanks
Kevin

[Jeff_Birt]

Kevin,

Welcome to the forum. As image formats go jpegs are the worst possible choice for this application as the compression process produces the artifacts that show up as the dimples and holes you see. The Designer software interprets the diffrent shades of gray as diffrent heights to carve so all the slight variations of gray in your image get carved at diffrent heights.

I always suggest creating an image with a few squares (say 200 pixels per side) and filled with diffrent shades of gray. Now import this into Designer and see what happens.

Try using the forums 'Search feature and search for jpeg or patterns, it might take a few tries but there is a wealth of information to be found.

[Ike]

For what it is worth, work it over a bit. Thanks Jeff for the tip, love all you can learn in here!

Ike

[jlitz]

If you have a V-Bit, give these vector conversions a try...

[kevinsmithrn]

I hope to give your suggestions a try this weekend... hopefully I can get a pic of the project I'm working on up in a few days... i do love this machine...

Kevin

[kevinsmithrn]

Hello,

JLITZ posted some files which converted my jpeg to vector paths - i hope i am using the right terminology... anyway those files are exactly what i was looking for... they seem to be the result i'm looking for... anyway I'm doing searches and looking at documentation but I'm not finding alot of help with converting similar jpegs to vector paths like JLITZ did... Can you give me a place to start on creating these files from jpegs and can you give me a little help manipulatingthem on my board... i.e. I cant take the vector picture of the ducks and use the layout feature to rotate the picture 90 degrees... it grays out this option when all the paths are selected... anyway I know the learning curve is pretty steep with some of these functions but I think if i can get pointed in the right direction maybe i can start climbing!

thanks
Kevin

[jlitz]

Hello,

JLITZ posted some files which converted my jpeg to vector paths - i hope i am using the right terminology... anyway those files are exactly what i was looking for... they seem to be the result i'm looking for... anyway I'm doing searches and looking at documentation but I'm not finding alot of help with converting similar jpegs to vector paths like JLITZ did... Can you give me a place to start on creating these files from jpegs and can you give me a little help manipulatingthem on my board... i.e. I cant take the vector picture of the ducks and use the layout feature to rotate the picture 90 degrees... it grays out this option when all the paths are selected... anyway I know the learning curve is pretty steep with some of these functions but I think if i can get pointed in the right direction maybe i can start climbing!

thanks
Kevin

I used the LiveTrace feature in Adobe Illustrator CS to convert the image into centerline paths and saved it as an older Illustrator 3 .ai file. (Other tools exist to accomplish similar results such as autotrace.) Then I used a tool I wrote ai2mpc (http://www.allcw.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=301) to convert it to Designer .mpc paths. See the above duck_paths_designer_1_120.mpc.

This generally works well for relatively simple artwork as Designer appears to have performance and stability issues with very complex paths. And, as you noticed, it’s not possible to rotate paths within Designer. The artwork would have to be pre-rotated to use the above steps.

If you check out the Designer 1.131 files (duck_designer_1_131.mpc / duck-vector_desginer_1_131.ptn), those can be rotated within Designer. As for creating those files, I can’t go into the details at the moment.

[kevinsmithrn]

Thanks, I'll research autotrace etc. on the 3.1 ext. file I intially thought there was a problem as when I originally loaded it the image was completely black... per your suggestion I went ahead and hit "finish" and assigned a file name... and now there is a rotatable image. thanks again... I'm looking forward to how you converted to the 3.1 image...

Kevin

[rstudley]

Hi-- trying to use Jeff Litz' ai2mpc technique for converting linework in Adobe Illustrator into vectors in an MPC file. I have Vista on my PC and the screens don't look the same. I can get to RUN but can't convert the file using the formula ai2mpc(filename).ai(filename)mpc. because I can't find a window to enter the commands in.
Any suggestions?

[mtylerfl]

Hi-- trying to use Jeff Litz' ai2mpc technique for converting linework in Adobe Illustrator into vectors in an MPC file. I have Vista on my PC and the screens don't look the same. I can get to RUN but can't convert the file using the formula ai2mpc(filename).ai(filename)mpc. because I can't find a windown to fill it in.
Any suggestions?

You probably could PM jlitz for info on his program and how to run it. I have it, but have not used it.

[jgowrie]

I used the LiveTrace feature in Adobe Illustrator CS to convert the image into centerline paths and saved it as an older Illustrator 3 .ai file. (Other tools exist to accomplish similar results such as autotrace.) Then I used a tool I wrote ai2mpc (http://www.allcw.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=301) to convert it to Designer .mpc paths. See the above duck_paths_designer_1_120.mpc.

This generally works well for relatively simple artwork as Designer appears to have performance and stability issues with very complex paths. And, as you noticed, it’s not possible to rotate paths within Designer. The artwork would have to be pre-rotated to use the above steps.

If you check out the Designer 1.131 files (duck_designer_1_131.mpc / duck-vector_desginer_1_131.ptn), those can be rotated within Designer. As for creating those files, I can’t go into the details at the moment.

Hmm. I searched the forum because I just spent an hour tracing an image within Designer, but I didn't pre-rotate my pattern to 90deg, which is what I needed. SO, a lesson learned the hard way I guess. It seems there is ONE vector which I can rotate and it's the only one which is a straigh line, no splines.

I'm curious about this post from a while back though. There was never an answer as to how the vector patterns which CAN be rotated were actually created.. at least not in this thread. Anyone know how? Was it the AI2MPC program?

I can probably duplicate my work I just did in about 20 minutes. 40 minutes were spent referring to the manual learning how to work with the vector drawing tools.

Sure would be nice if designer would just IMPORT SVG/AI files, sigh.....

Copy of what I worked on is attached if anyone wants to look for any reason