Some wallpapers I 'made'

Post by **baphomet_irl** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:40 pm

all of these are 1280x1024:

The first one is a capture of Ryu's fireball from SFII Turbo - nothing special - just the image itself - but Im happy,
cos I finally worked out how to resize lo-res/old school images and preserve the pixel integrity - leave them as indexed/GIF
when resizing :p (the black bar at the bottom is below the windows taskbar size - so u wont see that if its set as a wallpaper) :

http://members.lycos.co.uk/baphomet_irl/RYUfireball.jpg

The second one is a screencap from Star Wars Arcade game (the vector one) - I stylised it a bit to look more 'liney' :

http://members.lycos.co.uk/baphomet_irl/Darthvect2.jpg

The third one is just a resized image of a Gamecube:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/baphomet_irl ... URPLE2.jpg

Post by **durkada** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:48 pm

I like the gamecube one -- I just wish people made more wall papers for 16:9 displays!

Anyway, you should check out Inkscape. Its and open-source vector imaging program which boasts a very powerful autotrace program. I bet you would have fun with that!

Post by **baphomet_irl** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 9:19 pm

I'll definitely check that out - I love vector stuff - autotrace in Illustrator, Freehand and Flash never seems to do exactly what I want though - ill give that a go

OMG - i jus tried it - the autotrace even on default was brilliant! - thx for the info

Post by **durkada** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 3:47 am

baphomet_irl wrote:I'll definitely check that out - I love vector stuff - autotrace in Illustrator, Freehand and Flash never seems to do exactly what I want though - ill give that a go

OMG - i jus tried it - the autotrace even on default was brilliant! - thx for the info

Glad you like it. I've been using it for some time. Amongst other projects, it's been extremely helpful for arcade restoration work -- old cabinet artwork that I scanned in and wanted to vectorize.

There is a very nice set of inkscape galleries on Deviantart.

Post by **baphomet_irl** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 4:07 am

cool, now i better buy that digital tablet Ive always been meaning to buy :p

Post by **Mozgus** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 4:50 am

durkada wrote:I like the gamecube one -- I just wish people made more wall papers for 16:9 displays!

Anyway, you should check out Inkscape. Its and open-source vector imaging program which boasts a very powerful autotrace program. I bet you would have fun with that!

Can I just feed an image into this thing and have it trace lines like that for me? That's what I was hoping for. I'm not about to spend the time to learn how to do it by hand.

Post by **durkada** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 12:56 pm

Mozgus wrote:
Can I just feed an image into this thing and have it trace lines like that for me? That's what I was hoping for. I'm not about to spend the time to learn how to do it by hand.

That's the whole point to the autotrace tool. Simply import a bitmap file in any popular form, and run it through the Autotrace. Autotrace has about six to seven different settings to play with -- which will determine the detail of the tracing, and to help point it in the right direction given the source material. Even so, with just the defaults, it's very powerful and produces good-to-great vector images. Spend a few minutes to figure out how the simple scan configurations work, and the images you produce will usually meet the highest expectations.

Post by **Mozgus** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 2:12 pm

durkada wrote:That's the whole point to the autotrace tool. Simply import a bitmap file in any popular form, and run it through the Autotrace. Autotrace has about six to seven different settings to play with -- which will determine the detail of the tracing, and to help point it in the right direction given the source material. Even so, with just the defaults, it's very powerful and produces good-to-great vector images. Spend a few minutes to figure out how the simple scan configurations work, and the images you produce will usually meet the highest expectations.

Still wondering where it is. Is it some secret macro or something? It's nowhere in the menus.

Post by **baphomet_irl** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 5:16 pm

ok - open inkscape

go to file/import - bring in a jpeg/bmp/gif/png or whatever you like.

make sure the image is highlighted

then go to Path/Trace bitmap

most autotracers dont give good results with more gradient filled/multi coloured images, and also tend
to actually draw the details of the edges of the pixels in which is definitely not what you want

Mess around with the different settings and use preview

but this one seems to be very good in default settings, making lines straight where you would probably want them to be

(hope you understand that

)

keep in mind that the program keeps an original of the imported image below where your traced art is, so in order to see it properly (and to be able to save a 'pure' vector file), you will have to drag the top/vector layer to move it away a bit and select the bitmap original and delete it

if you want to send it to someone, save it as a PDF, which will keep the document vector - you could use SVG also, but not everything can view it - although as this is an opensource app, I'm sure the people who made it intend you to use SVG

heres an example of what you can do in a few seconds:

heres the original:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/baphomet_irl ... taBACK.jpg

and heres vector traced using the outline mode:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/baphomet_irl/newDeltaPDF.pdf

you can see that if u press ctrl+ to zoom in on the pdf file, it is proper vector lines

Post by **Mozgus** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:29 pm

Hmm ok cool. Not bad. Works pretty nice for hand-drawn, unshaded sketches.