I’m trying to use estlcam to create a carve from a ‘line’ drawing I was given, which is a photo of a pencil sketch:
What I’d like to do is open/import this into estlcam and then create a carving overtop this using manual shape detection (clicking on the canvas, just using the image as a guide for where to click). The tutorial videos make this look easy - but I’m unable to get the image into estlcam to start with. When I try to open or insert it, I’m forced to let the software try to compute either a carve or a halftone (which don’t work because the image isn’t very connected).
What am I missing?
BTW, I’ve tried converting it to svg (which a browser can display fine), but when I open that estlcam complains that there isn’t anything in the file it understands…
You definitely want to convert it to svg. I don’t think an online converter will work though. I have used inkscape to “trace bitmap” before with success. You can find youtube tutorials about it. inkscape is free/open source and reputable.
Inkscape works really well for tracing a bitmap but I have found there are occasionally dimensional changes to the image. The process may also give you a ‘double line’ of the original image single line since it traces around the images line. You get to go through and get rid of the second line to reproduce it properly.
I would save the traced image as either a SVG or DXF (or both) and import it into Estlcam.
Yeah Inkscape is tracing the outlines of the strokes… think I’m going to try tracing over the original image in Inkscape rather than in estlcam. Looks like it going to take some work to do the tracing in inkscape, but at least I’m left with a format that can be edited later…
Thanks for the inkscape pointer - I think that’s the key to getting this to where I need it for importing into estlcam.
