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57 Comments

  1. What can I say but...Nice!
    I knew Inkscape could trace bitmaps but I had never thought about importing them into blender like that. Great idea.

  2. Great + lithographically nice!!

    Two questions:

    1. How can you trace stuff in 3d (meaning both front and side...) automatically ?

    2. What was that feature Chris used to smooth the lower part of the n in nice?

  3. Another entertaining and educational video. Someday you have to release a video about making one of these videos.

    @shul: about your 2. question he simply removed the vertices (bezier points) in the middle of the curve.

  4. In inkscape, you can also simplify path or reduce vector points by pressing Ctrl+L. Works really well and keeps with the original shape. By the way, i have used the trace bitmap function in other (commercial) apps. and I still think inkscape's is better.

  5. Thanks Chris - seams you are really keeping your schedule.
    Is there an archiv where all these videos will be in one place to easy access?

  6. I've used the Live Trace feature in Illustrator before, it's very "nice". I never knew that Inkscape could do that too. I think I'll stick with Illustrator though since I shelled out the big bucks for it, lol....

  7. Thanks a lot for the Tutorial !

    I had used WinTopo before to extrude building walls from blueprints, but with poor results. I had never installed Inkscape. Now it is done, and it will be very useful !

  8. Master Danix on

    Wait a momento

    after all i always had this since i have Inkscape !

    So this is a Inkscape plugin.

    It´s very coool and useful

    Thanks Peter

  9. I often use the tracing function in inkscape for my 2D print work. It does an excellent job. Just recently I've started importing SVGs into blender and aside from the object centers not being in the center of the curves it imports seamlessly. I've had much better success importing SVGs into blender than other vector formats.

  10. Chris, you're doing an awesome job. Aside from being wildly entertaining (if you're into Blender) you're focusing on features a step or two past "This is how we make a cube". And they're nugget sized. You're a treasure. Keep it up.

  11. Nice... I had just finished tracing a logo (two, actually) in Blender the hard way when I took a break, hopped on BN and found this. You can imagine how I felt at first.

    Though I'm thinking that's the other "BlenderNation Effect:" just when you wonder how to do something, along comes BN with another tutorial. It's like they're in my head... 8^(

  12. Great job Chris, this is the second time I see your informative movie, with so much information and fun!
    I love watching it!

  13. Eh, get good with the pen tool in Illustrator and your fine. It's like trying to understand human form without knowing how to draw. You miss a lot. AAFTER wards then use the auto tracing

  14. Is there a way of taking a complicated photograph (human face?), applying varying levels of saturation (to give many photos with only very specific shades of grey turned black on a solid white background), and then importing all of these photos (onto different layers) in blender, giving a detailed 2 dimensional portrait? Given 2 photos (front and side), it would be possible (although a bit of work) to create a nice 3d model this way. Is it possible?

    Bob

  15. Cool to see this here!
    I've been using this quite a bit lately for taking rasters (even very ugly rasters) and making nice SVGs to use on a vinyl cutter or laser cutter/engraver. The results are very very nice.
    I've also just used the import to blender to make modeling from concept art much easier, I foresee doing it much more often as well...

  16. "Say, is that a self-powering bluetooth scanner?"

    No, it's a USB-powered Canon Canoscan LiDE80 scanner. Hence the black USB cable plugged into the back. The button on the front autofires by default a program called Arcsoft Photostudio or Arcsoft Photobase, which uses TWAIN to capture the image. All at the touch of one button. (i have that same scanner - and have even used it for stuff like this before)

  17. I don't know if anyone realizes just how worried I am before the movie goes up. I have no idea if I've selected the 'right topic' and I spend a considerable amount of time trying to guess just what would be the best thing to do next.

    I'm hearing many people ask how I make these movies. I thought that I'd keep that for a later time when I've covered a broader spectrum and gotten into a routine.

    I spoke to Bart about covering some beginners topics so that I would have time to research for the 'Behind the UI' movies. We'll see.

    @Cyrr
    Schedule? There isn't really one. I was given the term of 'regularish' And I'm holding BN to it ;)

    @DramaKing
    probably still tracing things. ;)

    @Tallguy
    Thanks.

  18. Fantastic. I'd given up on autotracing, except for over-complicated looks-nothing-like-the-original effects.
    Can't afford Illustrator, but hey, with all these open source tools, who needs it. Or wants it. You just don't get the same gratitude filters with pay-through-the-nose bloatware.

  19. the penny dropped! thanks Chris, this has started a whole new development work flow. Tie this into live trace in Illustrator or just any design work and away we go.

    Really Major step...Cheers

  20. @LL,

    I think when Chris says, "thanks, Peter," I think he means Peter Selinger, the guy who wrote Potrace. You see, the basic tracing engine of Inkscape -is- Potrace. I wrote the code to embed Potrace in Inkscape, and added a few filters (brightness, Canny edge detection, quantization, multiscan, etc), and with the help of others, glued it to Inkscape and added a GUI.

    But still, all of the smarts are in Peter's Potrace code. I have always been amazed how such a small program with such a simple algorithm can produce such wonderful results and good fidelity with the traced image. Peter is something of a genius. In fact, one little thing I make absolutely certain of, is that we always give Peter prominent credit for his generosity. He's a pretty nice guy, too. ^^

  21. Why to blender though? is it to be used in another project? Isn't inkscape good enough for cleaning up and using your tracing?

  22. Nevermind figured it out. You got to click on the picture that you want to trace as well. He seems to skip this step in the tutorial. That and he goes the a bullet through it. Took me 3 views to figure out that he started with Gimp.

  23. This is a great reference, well scripted - concise and to the point.  In short: a perfect tutorial.  I remember watching this video years ago - and now, it's still the best (I like you Gaussian blur trick btw - very clever).  Thank you.

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