I’ve wrapped my head around vectorizing photos for a while now. How can I easily vectorize an image in a stylish way to draw it with the plotter or carve it on a suitable surface?
I like these alot! How can I make such vectorized images myself? The drububu-page https://drububu.com/miscellaneous/shapepacker/index.html seems like an interesting place to start. If I uploaded a custom vector and used it to generate the image, I would perhaps get somewhere close? I’m struggling to understanding that tool ATM.
I really don’t understand this errormessage from the shapepacker tool: “def’s not supported… use adobe illustrator or inkscape to modify your SVG.” What does it mean??
If your photo is graphics and can easily be represented in a vector format, you can use inkscape’s “trace bitmap” function. It doesn’t work well on a picture of someone’s face, but it works well on a photo of a sign that you want to carve.
Yes, I’m aware of this option - right now I’m more interested in how to convert the images in to shapes that can be easily traced. The geometrical patterns and shapes are nice. A simple solution would be to convert it to lines, where the lines would be closer the darker the area is. But hooow?
The travelling salesman solution seems like an interesting way to do it, especially with a v-bit and scaled width lines… A more complicated workflow to be sure, but interesting nonetheless.
Bonus points for the patience and skills to make an inlay from a TSP project…
I know I know, it’s not very nice to try to steal or rip their product - but honestly, converting images to lines (circluar, wavelike, straight, triangles, etc) can’t surely be very unique??
The tsp drawing starts with a stipple, which is a pattern of dots where the density of the dots is related to the darkness of the image in an area. Then draw a tsp path through them all. Done.
The triangle fill and circle pattern seems similar where instead of a tsp path you triangulate, for example by Delauney triangulation. For the circle pattern you would place circle size and density depending on image darkness, or maybe you could just do stipple first and then convert to circles according to the distance to the nearest other dot.
For lines like the ‘spiral’ or ‘paper cutout’ of that kickstarter, thats a pretty similar to a traditional halftone where the width of the line is proportional to the image darkness.
Of course thats just the algorithm, actually acquiring the software to do it is a different matter.
One other option I’ll throw in there is ASCII art.
Check out this topic on my laser forum. It’s a pretty cool program. It uses the programming language called Processing (not a very helpful name because it cause so much referential ambiguity). Processing is fairly simple to learn enough to make cool stuff. It excels in computer generated art. It’s very useful for visualizing data. Not too hard to install and learn, but there are so many sketches that generate amazing art and design and give great vectors.
Here’s the link to his github.
There are loads of other art generating sketches that folks have made and uploaded.
Thanks a lot for the Processing reference, and especially the squiggle draw! I played a little with it, and it seems to do precisely what I’m looking for. Too bad the laptop retina screen messes up the interface, making it super tiny! Trying to adjust the PPT settings for the program haven’t worked. I’ll hook up a regular screen and try out more.
I’ll check other tools/script in the Processing community, and let you know.
I see what you did there… 