Is there such thing?

[Storm]

Hello there every. I'm sorry if this has been covered someplace already I tried to look but with six bazillion threads..... lol..... Is there a program that will auto trace a logo lets say .JPG or .PNG and save it as a .ILD file? Thanks for any help with this matter.

[bungy]

No. But there is one that will trace a .BMP and save it to .ILD. It's called bmp2ild.

[buffo]

Many laser light show software packages include a tool to trace an image. Pangolin's Quickshow, Beyond, and Showtime all come with trace engines, LSX has a trace feature, and I'm pretty sure even Spaghetti included one. I know Mamba had a video tracer, so I assume it would also trace a single bitmaped image. Plus there's always ILDA-SOS, which will convert structured drawing images to ILDA frames.

Adam

[Admin]

All these converter programs suck in their own special way. This is largely due to the fact that pixel path estimation is done by looking forward and back n steps for small delta shifts in color to determine a vector, or more bluntly, by using a huge delta to determine edges and then following a path by doing a neighbor check... Gradients fail awesomely because of this. After beating your head against the software for a while you will eventually give up and do things the hard way, by hand.

My toolpath typically involves 3d modeling junk and then extracting spline data. At least that way I know I have an easy to work with Bezier curve.

For image conversions; The best way I've found is with Inkscape using the Path > Trace Bitmap thing, cleaning it up/removing a bunch of garbage and then feeding the newly minted spline data to ILD SOS and then cleaning it up again.

This usually nets the best results. If you get comfortable with Inkscape and the limitations of said conversion process I'm sure people here, myself included, will be glad to help with the "Get it in laser" portion.

[swamidog]

there is also "lasercam", which is primarily designed as a real time video->ilda exporter, but i have been known to use it to grab still screen shots of graphics/logos/etc and convert it to ilda when i'm feeling too lazy to fire up inkscape.

[james]

It shouldn't be too time consuming to manually draw vectors over a raster image, If it is, you probably have too much detail in the image and it won't scan well anyway.

James.

[swamidog]

It shouldn't be too time consuming to manually draw vectors over a raster image, If it is, you probably have too much detail in the image and it won't scan well anyway.

James.

yes, but it's a huge pain manually tracing if you're doing animation or video sequences.

[james]

That's true, but that's not a single image of a logo.

You can open a bmp file into the background of the display area of LaseBoy and manually trace over it, and blank and color it as you go along.

Or, if you can't figure that out, you can use your favorite CAD app and use a mouse to draw over an image with the POLYLINE tool. Save that as DXF and open that in LB to optimize it for laser and save it as ILD.

For free.