Exporting vector files from Blender

okay okay hi everyone this is just going to be a short video where i'm going to show you how to export vector files from blender now these can be used in two different ways they can be used to make robotic drawings but they can also be used to prepare things for the laser cutter so let's have a little play around so the first thing i have to do is i have to enable a plug-in in blender so if i go edit preferences and in this little search bar where in add-ons i'm just going to put svg which means scalable vector graphics i think and you want to make sure both of these are ticked import export you don't need it for now but maybe later and but most importantly render freestyle svg exporter so make sure they're ticked and you know save your preferences okay so i'll show you what we've just done if i delete everything in my scene actually i'll just delete the cube and the light we don't need those actually look let's keep the light why not alright so i'll add in the monkey mesh monkey okay now in order to render a vector file which is something that um uh robotic actuators like drawing plotters or laser cutters need we need to tell blender not to just render a pixel image but to render a vector file so what we can do is go to the render tab and we have to tick freestyle svg and freestyle so tick both of those and then we have to go into [Music] i think the let me remember this okay down the bottom of the layer properties we've also got a freestyle thing now that's been set up and i'm going to untick these and i'm just going to use edge mark first and i'll show you what that'll do it'll render all of the edges of our form as long as we tell it that they're freestyle edges so in edit mode i just press a and it makes sure all the edges are selected then i right click and say mark freestyle edge and they'll go green like that so now if i go to my animation tab and okay good my camera is pointing at the monkey so the last thing i have to do is i have to set an output path and this is important because this vector file is actually going to go straight out of blender to somewhere else so you know let's put it somewhere intelligent i'll put it in my teaching folder where are we digital tools and i'll call it um vector files i haven't set this up at all i should also um save my file file save as and let's go als also to digital tools and start setting our stuff up project files and let's call it blender project files and i'll save this as vector vector vector export dot blend okay great so now we're all nice and safe okay so the last thing i have to do is i have to set okay i've set my output path there good so let's do a render render render image and we we got two things we got our regular um you know render of this colorless monkey but we also got these lines now what these lines are showing us if we go to that folder that we just set up blah blah blah blah blah teaching um digital tools vector files oh it's gone here it's gone to the root okay so we have this file here which we can open um we can just open it straight in the browser so what we have is a vector file and this vector file can then be sent to um you know a laser cutter or um yeah or the robotic drawing machine or whatever so that's one of the things that we're going to prepare for this week so now of course we can start to do things in a little bit more of an advanced way so for example oops i don't want to delete my camera if i get rid of the monkey let's say i want to make a i don't know if i want to cut a square for example well here we've got a square maybe we want a rectangle maybe i want the scale on the x to be 2 and we want to make this vector file what we do is we want to set the camera so it's pointing straight down like that i'll grab it on the x axis move it up and i'll just make sure that i'll press ctrl 0 here to say that i'm looking through that camera and then i'll set that camera to orthographic and orthographic will just mean that there's no perspective warping it we're looking straight at our rectangle and let's say we wanted to make two of them i just duplicate that might make sense to rotate this camera rz90 so i've rotated it i'll just reposition it and the camera is too small so orthographic if we move the camera it doesn't change the scale because there's no perspective we have to change the um the scale on the camera itself but okay so here's our object and again we're going to edit mode um right click mark freestyle edge and do the same for the other one right click mark freestyle edge now one important thing is that when we set um this you'll notice that the name of the file it makes will be the frame name so if i go back here you'll see that we've got this zero zero zero one and i messed up i should have made it go into the vector files folder so if i hit render again it will overwrite that first one we made so either you should you know rename this to something else we could call it monkey why don't we just do that now monkey test one because i'll show you if i render this again render render image we're going to have another file called okay i didn't change the file path it's still here called 01 but if i change the um the frame to let's say frame number 23 and i render the image again and now i look in our folder we've got number 23. so you know if you're making a lot of vector images just change the frame that you're working on and the next thing that we do if we wanted to edit these vector images is we'd go into a program called inkscape and i might just i was working on something else i'll just close all of this and i'll just open it again inkscape is where we will do any basic editing on our vector file so if i wanted to bring this in to bring in our monkey i could go file import and then go to um gosh wherever i've been doing all my work oh this is going to be fun on my pc where is my dropbox good gosh is it here yes no peter you need to think about this before you make a tutorial and now you're talking to yourself during the tutorial that's fun someone tell me where my dropbox is there dropbox okay um now we want teaching digital tools okay so i'll go and grab the monkey test open it up and here's our monkey object and um we'll talk about this more in class but you know we can now edit it individually we can grab parts of it move the vectors double click on it we can even grab the handles and move them so now we can edit it as a vector object that now we can do kind of interesting things with such as sending it to the laser cutter and so on okay so that's the end of this quick tutorial just showing you how to export vector images from blender okay guys see you soon

Channel: P N

Views: 153

Keywords:

Id: t0h-LzO84-g

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021