Convert your logo to FreeCAD PART 1 of 4: Image to vector using Inkscape and import, Beginners guide

hi and welcome to the channel and today we're looking at creating logos so we're going to create a logo from jpeg and import it into inkscape this is a four part video so this first part will revolve around using inkscape trace bitmap feature and how to use that to the best that we can and exploring the different options in there to produce our svg at the end of it so we're vectorizing that jpeg then review the image see if we've got any problems in there the image will come out as a stencil so the middle of the image will have logo in there and you'll be able to see through that we want the reverse we want that background removed and that middle part almost like a stamp so we can extrude that out so that's what i'm going to be showing you in this video so stay tuned if you like this video please hit like and also subscribe to the channel i also have a kofi site where you can actually donate to my contributions to the community and that's at ko hyphen fi.com mang0 so this is the logo that i'm going to recreate in freecad so we're going to use some tools in inkscape to convert that to a vector graphic bring that over to freecad and then start padding or extracting out parts to create this logo in some kind of solid form now i'm going to show you a couple techniques for doing this so if one doesn't work you can move to the other the first technique we're going to do is using the trace bitmap i'm going to talk around how to use that trace bitmap so you can get an idea of some of the gotchas in there where you might get some artifacts up here you need to resolve and how the actual trace bit map actually works so this is the logo and what we're going to do is go to file and import this is a simple logo that we're using with this one i'll be getting progressively more complex as i move along through the tutorials so this is logo one let's open that up and it will ask you first when you're importing the logo this is a jpeg that i'm importing it'll ask you what you want to do with the actual logo itself for the actual image file now i want to embed it in this if i link it and make any amendments to it it gets reflected in the file i'm not looking to make room amendments on the logo itself i'm just looking to convert it but it's best to embed it just in case we accidentally edit the file and it gets saved back to the original image now the image dpi is going to take you straight from the file i'm not going to worry about smooth or blocky these two here we're just taking it as it's let's okay that and what will happen is that it'll be imported in and we have our image here what we need to do with this image is vectorize it so that converts the image as it is as in raster image of pixels to effector image now the vector image has a number of mathematical points and a description which is actually plain text that describes where all the paths are so the image itself will be converted to maps and paths and we'll be able to see that when it's converted and be able to see it in the text as well this image is sitting here we can see it's a raster so if we zoom in don't use the zoom tool you can see it starts pixelating as we zoom in so what i want to do is convert this now there's two ways of getting to the tool that we need we can right click on the image so if i click on the select and transform objects which is f1 on the short cut keys so i can select the image and right click i can go to trace bitmap or up to path and trace bitmap there now it's in the path menu because when you trace bitmap it will be converted to paths now you get the tracebit map window open this may differ depending on what os you're on and also what version of the inkscape i believe the mac os you will have a button down here that allows you to flip between the multiple scans and the single scans and you just press on that button to get what you want but as long as you've got these two you're okay and i'm going to be using the multiple scans now multiple scans allows you to specify a number of scans so scans down here is at the moment set to 8. so when we specify the number of scans that will take basically a num literally a number of scans through the image and section out the image depending on what you've picked here so we've got brightness steps colors and grays if we've picked brightness steps it will look through the image look looking for eight levels of brightnesses and we'll section out literal copies of that image and just pull out those parts out of that brightness the same with colors but it does it on the colors and we'll demonstrate that in a minute so we'll start with brightness steps now you may find one will be more effective than the other depending on the content of your logo or what's in your image and we can see that and inspect that as we go so i'm going to click on brightness steps i want to stack the scans but i don't want to use the smoothing i find this can cause a bit of an issue sometimes and if we look and see see what this does it actually applies the garrison blur to the bitmap before tracing which means we get a fuzzy edge and most of the time i find that's not very helpful when trying to create a bitmap we tend to use a garrison blur to cover up mistakes we don't want to do that we want to correct those mistakes so we turn that off now the good thing is that we can do a preview on here so we've got brightness let's update this and you can see we've got this image here so i've gone eight scans through there let's do something like six because i don't need eight it's quite it's quite a simplistic image and i would go for color for this but let's go for the um brightness steps and see what we get so i'm going to go for that and let's have a look see what actually happens so hit ok and what happens we wait and we wait for this button to come back so it comes back on grade we don't get a message or anything which is it's a shame because sometimes it can be confusing whether this has done it or not but if we look at the back you can see back at the image it's gone more like a gray scale so we're all good there don't hit okay again of course it will do it again so we don't need to do that to close the window down now what's happened it hasn't replaced the original image if i click and drag this you see the original image underneath so we've got the raster based image here and the vector based image here so that's the jpeg this is the vector let's bring those to two together there we go so remember when we zoomed in you could see the pixelization starting here so this is where we want to have a look and see if we got any artifacts or any problems around here so you can see we've got now not much cleaner line but you look at all this in here there's artifacts here and that's because it's found a place of lighter brightness and it's pulled those into separate parts and you can see that when you go to object and objects and this gives you the layer and everything is grouped together at the moment so remember that now remember we got six scans so there should be six parts here so each path is basically a slice well not really a slice a a pass through the image and getting lighter as we go down so let's ungroup this that's ungroup now and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to zoom out a bit more i'm going to show you what's happened so using the select and transform object let's move that top layer out let's click off and just click once so one path has been selected and move that out let's move over here so there's one there you can see that's as we go down they get lighter two three four five and last one six yeah that's the last one six so you can see how they've got lighter and picked up basically less and less detail if they've gone down with this one may differ depending on which one you want so i'm going to get rid of all these and i'm going to use these two but first thing first is i'm going to inspect these and have a look see if we've got any artifacts in there so quite clean actually along there so this is the one thing you need to do is inspect your effector to see if we've got anything weird going on it's look it's looking nice and clean actually ah there we go so we've got some problems here as we move around the image around the vector a few problems there some in there so this is probably the artifacts you saw taking chunks out the image and there we go as well look at those so we've got those there and we'll be able to see this in more detail actually when we remove this part here and we've probably got the same over here but what i'm going to do is i'm going to reverse this so at the moment if i just bring this over here you can see that this is a cut out i don't want that to cut out it's really easy to resolve that so we double click and we pull away the points and what happens when we do that when we pull this point right down and over you can see that we let's undo that a second got a bit mental there let's try that again so you have to be very careful if you're using the touch pad with this because it can be a bit temperamental so i'm going to pull these out the way and i'm going to delete these points i just delete these out there we go those are all gone let's do that last one so we've got our vector here let's see what's going on so now we've pulled those away we've got these everywhere and these were our artifacts now these are probably different parts of that so we could select these if we so desired and got get rid of them but that's going to take us ages to actually do that see we can select those and get rid of that that's going to take us ages so we don't want to do that let's have a look at the other one so let's zoom out using shift and just tap in to zoom out and what we're going to do is look at the other image so i'm not happy with that vector at all so look at our other one now do we have the same here and it's around here wasn't it we had the problem this one might be clean so let's do the same clicking on our select transform objects double click and move these away so actually i could connect that point to there there we go smooth that out the way i missed that one actually just move those out of the way and just highlight them delete delete and delete these two got one last one sitting there and might be this one actually and that's restricted to there let's see what we got this may have resolved it actually i think that's resolved it so it's depending on what slice you take may have different amounts of artifacts in there or maybe just right for you but just work the borders around here to having a look to see if you've got anything that's a bit out of the ordinary that you need to resolve another nice thing you can do also is with these you see we're looking quite clean we're looking very clean actually it's kind of the best one i've done yep so this that's the it's nice and clean so one of the things is is that this might be too over complex they've been may have quite a lot of points so this this one's got quite a few points in there you have to be careful with this next technique because if you want to reduce this amount of points you can go up to path and simplify let's reduce the points down you can see those points have reduced down but we may end up with a more rounded image so i'm looking at this it doesn't look right quite right controls that that you can see that in here i'm just going back and forth with the control z so let's come in here so you can see i'm just redoing and undoing you'll see how that's rounded those because it's reduced the amount of points so i'm not going to do that i'm going to leave that as is and that is quite a nice end result i'm quite happy with that so it's worth going through the different paths to find out which one's which so this is path one three three we don't want that one because it's our old one just leave that one there and what i'm going to do is do the same with this logo but this time do it with the colors so what i'm going to do now is do exactly the same but this time i'm going to be using the color one on this one so rather than brightness click on it right click and trace bitmap this time we're going to move to colors so click on colors and we're going to go six again on there okay now this may take a little longer and what will happen is that we'll divide this hour into six scans and we'll try to fit the colors across those six scans so let's come back now let's close that now again we should have two so our raster is not there it's here so this is a raster you can see it's a highlighted image there i don't need that anymore so i'm going to get rid of that so we're going to deal with our vector let's ungroup this right click and go to ungroup so that'll break this out into the individual scans there we go so we've got all the paths there and we can start dividing these out so i'm just going to click off and just click on so the path is highlighted there and we'll just move that so you can see we've got some background there and we definitely don't want that and we're going background don't want that more background we definitely want that so that's remove that one so that's good and then we've got the other color there and we've got is that another one that's the white so we don't want the white we've got this one let's go for the blue remember because we bring it into freecad we don't want colors we just want the shape so that's good so we've got that there again we can zoom in and have a look see we've got any artifacts and i know for a fact that this one will be clean because i've used this before on this one and it's looking good and we do the same so i want this reverse i don't want any of this background so i'm going to double click this background and just move the nodes out the way i can even connect those together nice nose together there just moving them out away okay and we'll take those down the bottom this one look at that come on there we go and our last one get rid of that so that's our logo done see what we got let's just have a quick inspection it's looking good actually it's looking very good yeah i'm pleased with that so that's all good so now we can save either all of these we don't want them both so i'm going to go for the color one i'm going to take this one uh logo svg that'll do that's my old fast replace that and i'm just going to get rid of the old one which is over here i'm going to use a color one now it's worth adjusting the document because it may cause a bit of problem you may get some extra space on them on the bottom so just bring this document up so we're going to document and i'm going to just adjust the size now in inkscape if i remember rightly it just sits from the top down so let's bring our logo down to the bottom i'll do document properties and then we can just custom size width and height i'm going to give it a bit more width just to give a bit breathing space there we go and just bring the height down this probably doesn't matter actually um but i like to keep it nice and tight to the actual image let's go 200 a bit more just using the up and down arrow keys to bring that up there we go that will do so let's go for 220 by 220 and just place that somewhere in the center close that and save that so i'm going to save as sticking downloads so i'm going to place this add shield star logo so that's there that's all done so in the next video we'll actually import this into freecad deal with any problems that we encounter and i'll teach you how to use the sketcher and the options in the sketcher to remove some of the clutter in there and we'll do some refinement around that logo so that's already up on my channel and i'll see you in there shortly if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to my site and also i have a kofi site um where you can actually donate a few pence or a few pounds dollars or whatever your currency is and that's at ko hyphen fi.com ming0 and there you'll be able to help me fund my site and all the money that i actually get from any funds will actually get pushed back into the channel thanks a lot for watching and subscribing i'll see you next time

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 14,855

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, logo, icons, livery, svg, vector, FreeCAD, trace, tracing, 0.1.18, 1.1.19

Id: LJ3SDzEAhg8

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021