Inkscape Image to Vector

in this video we're going to be discussing vectorizing an image in Inkscape now Inkscape is a really great vector drawing program and has a lot of capabilities we're really not going to be able to cover the program in depth the best place to get tutorials and information on Inkscape is probably going straight to youtube because there are endless tutorials on this program also there are a number of instruction manuals that can be purchased also for Inkscape that will walk you through everything about the program and if you were doing plasma cutting for art as the main your main business i highly recommend you get to know this software really well it's very powerful and it can do a lot for you but this video is just covering vectorizing very basics so the first thing i've pulled in this little marlin image that i pulled off the internet and this could be any image it could be an image that was drawn and scanned into the computer it could be an image that you drew in a separate program be that Photoshop or or it could be one like this like you found on the Internet so the first thing you want to do once you have the image pulled in is to make sure it's selected okay with it selected I can then go up to this path file up here and click on that I go down to the third one down trace bitmap okay that will then pull this window up here now there's a number of different options you can play around with this is the mode at which it uses to create the paths called brightness cutoff that's one we're going to be using and by increasing or decreasing by increasing this threshold I'm going to basically make the essentially the the pass a little less sensitive so that there's a chance I'll get smoother lines this is particularly important if you are using an image that's of a low resolution because when you vectorize it you can actually pick up the pixel edges if it's a low enough resolution and then you can have just it creates just a lot of points and an image with a lot of points and nodes on it will be a lot more difficult for the plasma cutter to cut out so generally the two things that I'm looking at is this I mainly use this threshold I'll move it up to say 0.5 0.5 for like I have here and generally I find that gives me good results but I do recommend you play around with there are additional options and you can set these smooth corners and thresholds to different levels you'll get different results but so we're going to go with these settings for this one so once you've decided on your settings you basically just click OK and then it vector eise's the image now the vectorize image is sitting right on top so you got to click on it and drag it to the side now this original image we don't need this anymore so what I'm going to do is just basically right-click on it and cut it get rid of it now I'm done with the trace bitmap option I can close that up so now we have our image and now our image is an effector format so basically it has lines around it so as you can see if i zoom in here and we now have these points all around it whereas before we didn't this was all just pixels so now the computer has drawn this shape and it knows the shape of this image and this can now be turned into a DXF file which can be transferred directly into sheet cam and then cut out so a few other things that we can do initially I'll talk about is at this point once you have a vectorized you can click on it and select it and you can scale it if you look up here right now it's set the pixels but you can change this to inches and then of course lock these two scales together so that the proportions will stay the same and I can change this to whatever size I want so let's say I'm going to make this to be 15 inches okay so right now I'm 15 inches by just under 15 and a half inches a lot of times what I do at this point this properties of this page here I will set this to be the same size as my material so I can go in the file and I can click on document properties if I go down to this middle box here I can set this to inches and I can turn this to the size of my plate so quite often I'm using a 4 by 4 sheet or a 48 and so I can close that out go back and now basically we have our sheet 48 by 48 sheet now what I can do is essentially I can draw I can pull in other images into here and then I can do the same thing I can vectorize each individual image rescale them and then I can arrange them on the sheet and essentially nest them together so that they will fit however I think is best now I can also go up here and copy this image basically and then I can paste this image and now I got two of them and I can decide okay well let's let's scale these together and I can try to basically arrange them however I think will best fit to fit whatever I want onto the screen on to this particular sheet okay so basically once I've nested up my sheet or if you know even if I just want to cut one of these these two out or just one for that matter basically the next step is to simply go over to file and click save as and I'm going to save it as a DXF format now you're going to look down here and the first thing you're going to see you're going to be looking for the desktop cutting plotter format the R 13 which is a standard DXF format so I'm going to save this to my desktop change Mariam to and save it you're always going to want to do this selection okay it's by default the one that's clicked so you just click OK so now these are saved is DXF I'll minimize this and I'm going to open up sheet cam and I can import that file right in so I go to import drawing I go to desktop there's my Marlin DXF I can double click on that now this is important to remember by default Inkscape exports all of its images in the DXF format in metric it's just hard coded into the DXF export and you can't really change unfortunately so you just got to know to set your scaling metric and even though you sized it in inches you need to scale it in metric so it will come out it will be the right size basically so I used to click that click OK and there's my images so there are my two Marlins and they're ready to be cut out now of course there are a few things that should be fixed in these images there are two little eyelids here this part needs to be connected to the main part and it's the same with the eye and needs to be connected so these wouldn't work for cutting otherwise the I would just fall out and this Gill our presentation would fall out too so what other videos will cover doctoring up images and working with them to get them ready for plasma cutting this is basically just vectorizing so that's all there really is to vectorizing in Inkscape really the biggest challenge when you're vectorizing an image art piece for plasma cutting is you want to try to minimize how many little nodes and dots you have now you can see there are quite a few in here generally I think but these areas are pretty good we should get a pretty smooth cut cutting this out sometimes if you have too many nodes it can basically make this machine lowdown in certain areas as it tries to get through all these points but these look pretty good so that is the video on vectorize and escape

Channel: Arclight Dynamics

Views: 322,802

Keywords: Vectorizing, image, in, Inkscape, vector images

Id: XNEnQW_rOGw

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2013