Inkscape to makercam issues

CAD/CAM Software Tips
1

I took a picture of a cartoon drawing that I want to cut out. I opened the photo from my iPhone in Paint.net. While in Paint.net I cut the image to be just he cartoon. I then inverted it so that I could see the cartoon (pen drawing) better and erased all the background, fiddled a little with it to make it more cutable and saved it as a PNG file. I opened the PNG file in inkscape and increased the size to cut. I saved it as a inkscapeSVG file. I opened Makercam.com and clicked on open file, found the inkscapeSVG file and clicked on open. The dialog box closed and nothing showed up.

Am I missing a step? Is there something else I should be doing? any help would be great.

Thank you

2

I was missing a step! After searching for ever and then posting this, I took a break. When I searched again, I found that my image was a rastor and I needed a vector. this is an easy thing to do in inkscape. Use the trace to bitmap function under path. Solved.

3 Likes
3

Vectorised raster images often need a lot of cleanup. Usually there will be a lot of extraneous short vectors you can remove, and disconnected paths you can combine, to get an image you’d want to cut. Otherwise the Z will be going up and down like a yo-yo, and you might have a couple birthday parties while waiting with the slow Z axis.

I did a pencil sketch one of my daughters did when she was about 4, pruned it down by at least a factor of 10, to around (iirc) about 3K separate lines. Hope your’s is easier. You might want to rescan it several times while tweaking the settings and maybe type of scan before editing, might make it simpler

4

I am just learning about rastor and vector, and how to use inkscape. How would l go about combining vectors?

I did the trace to bitmap twice.

Thank you,
Zachariah

5

Inkscape has a built in vector editor. I don’t have to it right now, but search for Inkscape vector graphics with your favorite search engine; for some reason I prefer duck duck moose.

It’ll probably take some practice to get used to it. I need to relearn it each time since I don’t edit vectors regularly enough