Quickly converting kid's sketch into lines/SVG for carving/cutting

Curious how people quickly convert paper drawings/sketches to SVG/DXF, where dimension accuracy isn’t important, so that carving/cutting toolpaths can be defined in EstlCam or your favorite CAM software.

There’s many ways to do this, guessing people here have found a better way than what I could think of. Cheers!

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I feel like this is a job for inkscape, but I suck at using inkscape. So I would import the job into onshape as a reference for a sketch and then trace the patterns with lines, arcs, curves. But it might depend on the drawing.

Something like black sharpie on a white background with be easy to convert to an svg in inkscape.

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Trace bitmap in inkscape! Super easy. And use a centerline plugin (not sure if its a part of the main install) to make single lines out of the drawed lines, if needed.

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I have tried and tried Inkscape and just can’t get it to do anything. I fiddled for an hour last night trying to get it to trace a simple bitmap, and I don’t know what I’m (not) doing!

Anyway - the easy way for me is - photo into photoshop, increase the contrast and get rid of all the junk you don’t want, export as PNG - then I have an app (on my imac) called The Vector Converter (it’s a subscription deal but I duck in and out of it and currently have it on a free trial.

It uses online servers and so far has been brilliant in converting to DXF (Photoshop will export to SVG)

I then take it into Onshape and extrude it (for printing) - will have to figure out what to do for CAM next.

I really do wish I could get Inkscape to do something. ANYTHING!

BUT I was also looking around for a way to tell you blokes that The Vector Converter works painlessly too!


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And what would be this vector converter?

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@RockinRiley My apologies, I thought I’d included a link. (I have now!)

the vector converter

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OK, please do not use this as an instruction - there may be many other ways of doing this better - but @azab2c asked about quickly converting a kids drawing.

Here’s what I came up with - from the time of taking the first photo of Miss 2’s “drawing” to the last screen shot of the 3d “carving” was 25 minutes. I am not a photoshop power user, but can figure it out rather than bumble through it, but I reckon I could easily halve that time if I was to do it again.

Process was -
1- Photograph drawing. Stupidly I forgot that most smartphones including mine have a “document scan” facility which would have upped the contrast and converted to black and white - use that!

2- In Photoshop - I selected the background and cut it out - but I felt that the drawing needed a bit more grunt.

  1. In Photoshop - I contracted the background selection by 5 pixels and made a mask. (there are other ways to do this but this is very automatic.)

  2. I made a new white background so I could see what was happening and painted over the original (cut out) image with a thick black brush - the expanded selection mask did it’s work perfectly.

  3. Quick export to .PNG and uploaded it to Vector Converter. (did this twice because the first time I accidentally converted to SVG)

  4. Imported DXF into a sketch in Onshape (did this twice too because that’s how I found my mistake above).

  5. Did a quick extrude of the drawing outline to check it was intact.

  6. Final extrude drawing.

9 Blank space so I can learn to turn this into a CAM setup!

I think 10 to 20 minutes is a realistic time for this process once you’ve had a bit of practice. Thanks for the question, I’ve been pondering this myself for a while and now I think I’ve crossed another bridge on my way to a functioning machine!

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Just a note ref:Inkscape.

Blockquote Do not update to macOS Ventura if you rely on Inkscape! There is an unresolved issue that currently affects all GTK3 based apps on macOS Ventura, making the app unresponsive to certain mouse events.

I haven’t yet done that, but can’t get it to function correctly on macOS Monterey - I’ve checked all I can think of but can’t find the grub screws.

I guess while I’m paying for photoshop and it’s doing the job that’s what I’ll keep using but it’s not a proper graphic package and I’m not going to pay the extra Adobe tax for the real deal!

Is anyone else using Inkscape successfully on a Mac?

Breaking gtk3… That is either extremely irresponsible or malicious.

Now you are way over my head! But I did find this on an Apple support thread:

This is code that Apple “soft deprecated” 15 years ago.

If you depend on this software, and running it under Ventura, then you have a few options:

  1. Wait for Apple to fix the bug in Ventura
  2. Wait for the developers of GTK3 to fix it
  3. Take some action on your own

Since I will eventually update my OS, and I really have no interest in being a developer, I guess further fiddling with Inkscape, sadly, is off the agenda!

Curious that it’s a bug that’s been known for so long yet no workaround has appeared - I guess that is a product of how little Apple stuff rates in the open source community?

I don’t want to pick a fight, but it would have been easy for apple to submit a patch to gtk3.

I find a lot of open source developers use apple, at least use the laptops. Software engineers generally are the biggest proponents of open source software and they also generally love apple laptops.

It is a brand new bug. The code where the bug exists has been “soft deprecated”, which generally means they took it out of the documentation, and have an alternative approach, but still have that code in there (for legacy software). The bug is brand new, but in code they didn’t think new code should be using. The code that was deprecated in the older versions of mac did not have this new bug.

GTK is a very popular tool for developers. A huge amount of software (open source, or otherwise) uses it. Not testing any gtk3 applications with an update would be extremely irresponsible for an OS (IMO, I don’t write OSes). Part of me wonders if this was part of increasing the height of the walls in the walled garden that is apple.

I bet a bugfix will come soon, from gtk. Because even though they work for peanuts, gtk will do the dirty work. Applications like inkscape will have to update their dev branches, and make new releases, so it could take a little while to move through the release conveyor belt.

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Wow that is crazy. My friend has an apple laptop and his inkscape has been so crappy lately. We tried everything to get it to work again. He was just about to wipe and reinstall. He even went to the apple store and they said there was nothing wrong.

Glad I haven’t lost all my tech skills. Have to text him right away.

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How would you sketch a parametric brick wall pattern? To engrave in EstlCam?

Current plan is fusion 360 sketch with some parameters and repeat patterns.

Some context… am engraving bricks onto exterior of a box that will be a storage container, but also a tree stand with tunnel cutouts for a cheap Polar Express Train acquired from HomeDepot. Well it was cheap, until I pissed away time/material on making various custom track mods, 3D printer has been busy… Started out as a project with the kids, teaching them about callipers, reverse engineering and making knock offs. But, I kept going after they lost interest and moved on to do something more meaningful with their lives.

Measuring the engraved brick pattern will help me better calibrate the LR3 too.

Installed Inkscape but haven’t used much, saw that there’s python based scripting plugins which is interesting to me. Seeing mixed views of Inkscape here. Tried OpenScad but am frustrated with the limited 2D primitives, and my primitive understanding of them. Crap app web page that generates SVG is tempting, at least JavaScript/typescript is a proper imperative language unlike OpenScad’s declarative’sh syntax for building graphs.

Mostly venting, but curious what others would use to generate SVGs with geometric code created patterns. Am digitizing hand drawn sketches too, so I appreciate the input folks have provided on that too.

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The answer to that question is way above my pay grade! Oh… wait that wasn’t a question! The reason I like apple stuff is that I am really comfortable not worrying about that stuff, and I am pretty good at working around things with the suite of free apple software.

Every now and then something comes along and shatters my illusion.

I’d use Onshape (Fusion for you) but really we both should be thinking about Blender - it’s just that I don’t want to go through another learning curve! (currently trying to dig a bit deeper into Photoshop…)

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Adobe didn’t want to pick a fight either!

BlockquoteIt is largely to do with GPUs, CPUs, and OpenGL technology. Adobe is fighting against Windows and Mac operating systems to try to keep their 3D technology up-to-date and able to work as well on both, but it cannot keep up. Adobe decided it’s best to retire Photoshop’s 3D functions instead.

Of course this just means they can trim a bit off their bloatware and sell us Illustrator for ANOTHER $30.00 per month! :open_mouth: (AUD) It makes me think I need to enrol in a college course somewhere.

Current plan is fusion 360 sketch with some parameters and repeat patterns

I use what I know, so for me, it would also be Fusion 360 unless the pattern was complicated. Fusion 360 does not handle complicated drawings well. Lightburn does handle complicated vector files, but it is harder to precisely space items in Lightburn.

For my laser, I did some pattern work in Fusion 360. For good or ill, I have a specific way I work. The important points:

  • I model a minimal drawing to capture the pattern. For example, if modeling a brick wall in which each layer was slid 50% from the previous layer, I would only need to model two bricks (two rectangles).

  • I extrude the bricks, and then do a rectangular pattern of the shapes creating a brick pattern bigger than I need for my final wall.

  • I will use new shape(s) and combine operations to trim the wall to its final size. If I wanted to capture the mortar rather than the bricks, I would do a further combine operation.

  • In a new sketch, I would project the bricks or the mortar. The resulting sketch can then be saved as DF.

Making the pattern using shapes rather than in the drawing, 1) keeps the drawing simple, 2) Fusion 360 seems to run better than with complicated drawings, and 3) creates a minimal DXF without capturing things like constructions lines.

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@bitingmidge have you tried Vectornator? It’s only supported on Apple devices and it looks a lot more user friendly than Inkscape.

@azab2c Hmmm, 3MF files include a UV map so I wonder if it would be easiest to apply a brick texture to your 3D box. Scale/position as you like and export a 3MF file. Then rename the 3MF extension to ZIP in your OS and pull out the UV map image. You’ll have to still convert the raster image to vector but I think that would be a pretty easy method to generate a nice brick pattern.

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Wow! I missed your original post as it was exactly as I was flying across the world, but I’ve just followed through - what’s not to like? I have read a couple of “reviews” I think it might just be the goods. Will download it and report back after Christmas - thanks for that.

The fact that it’s available in the App Store gives it a lot of brownie points in my book too - just makes it a bit less dodgy - but how do they pay for this?

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Yeah, I’ve always thought about that on free apps. Maybe they’ll eventually create a “Pro” version after the user base increases.

My goto vector tool is Illustrator so I have not used Vectornator a lot. It seems pretty user friendly with my limited use so I’d be interested to see what you think after you use it for awhile.