Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Rastor to Vector Image Software
Technical Direction Tidbits: "Arbor Image has two products that are interesting for drafting; Draftsman Cutting Shop and Draftsman 2002. These programs take rastor images (like a photograph or scanned in drawing) and covert it to vector art."
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3 comments:
This looks like an interesting piece of software, but I wonder how it compares to Adobe Illustrator's tracing software, or other products that have been around for a while that are designed to do vector artwork. One key difference that I see between this and other tracing software is that Arbor Image's software seems to be geared towards generating a tracing just so you can send it to your CNC or other similar device, instead of creating a piece of artwork that can be scaled to a much higher resolution. In terms of other tracing software, vectormagic, which was originally a research project at Stanford (now has spun of as a company, and you have to pay for it now), does an amazing job at tracing, so Arbor Image's offering appears to be in a different category of software.
I really like CAD. I think that drafting on computers is very useful, and I'm glad that we have access to the programs that let us do so. I feel like a lot of the industry does it drafting on computers. I don't know a lot about the differences between raster and vector images, but I think anything that makes the process easier is a great thing. I do know that resizing vector images works better, which is amazing for drafting work, so I like hearing they can do this. I also think its cool that you can take a scanned image and convert it into something that the cnc can read rather than having to trace. Tracing seems like it'd be a frustrating waste of time and I'm glad that there is a way around that now.
Oh! Very nice. There used to be a free to use image to raster program developed by grad students at Stanford - now it goes by the name Vector Magic and requires you to pay for each image vectorized. But vector shapes are beautiful and incredibly useful. Does the Photoshop class at CMU expand into Illustrater? Because if not, it's an useful skill to have. Even costume designers need it (and I know how much they distrust computers). Most professional embroidery software works the same way.
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