Creating Illustrator Blocks from Images

[irneb]

I'm trying to ween my office from PS into IL. A time consuming exercise I'm running into is taking things like trees to place on the presentation drawings. In PS they'd usually just get some photograph of a tree, then crop the surrounds off using the magic selection tool. Now we've got a huge library of these types of images saved in 32bit PNG (with transparency). It's simple using these in IL, but for the shadow effect - which won't follow the transparency. So I need to draw a border and then "fill" it with the image, tiled at 1x1.

 

Here's what I'm trying to do:

 

• The IRF file
  
• The PNG File
  

The problem is to create the border around the image. I either (like the above) draw it using the spline tool (which takes a long time), or I go with the Gimp-path-Inkscape-OOo method as below:

 

Open the PNG in Gimp, use the wand selection tool to pick the outside, invert the selection, convert selection to path, save the path to SVG. Open the SVG in Inkscape, saveas to ODG, open in OOoDraw, saveas to DWG, import into IL. This is simply too much as well.

 

Anyone know of another quick an easy method to get the "outline" of an image as DWG polyline / spline? Or is there something I'm missing in IL? I know I could generate the shadow as a separate PNG from PS/Gimp and place as underlay - but then rotation's going to be a problem - since the shadows shouldn't vary in direction.

[f700es]

Do you create the shadow in PS/Gimp or in Impression? Very nice effect you have going. Here is a screen ggrap for those without Impression.

 

Let me play with that base png file and see what I can come up with. I would love to see some completed work.

Thanks

 

Sean

[irneb]

I created the shadow in Impression. If I made it through Gimp/PS then it would simply have been an image - i.e. if you rotated it the shadow would rotate with it. If the shadow is cast inside Impress - you have it pointing in the same direction no matter how you've rotated the block. The problem is Impress only throuws shadows from the borders of an object, so if you add a shadow onto a square image (even if the image has transparent areas) you end up with a square shadow. Here's what I mean. Notice the border around the one on the left. While the one on the right is simply a square, which makes the shadow square as well:

 

Now if I generate a shadow of the image in Gimp (which BTW is extremely simple to do):

 

Then use that inside Impression, it looks correct until you rotate the thing:

 

BTW, could we have the forum's rules adjusted to allow IRF files? The links in my previous post are to an outside server as this forum does not allow uploading of those files.

[irneb]

Anyhow, I've found something which works slightly better. Still have to use Inkscape to open the SVG file generated from Gimp (http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-path-dialog.html). Then open the SVG file in Inkscape, but in order to save it to something usable you need this extension: Better DXF Output, which allows you to saveas to a DXF file (which unlike Inkscape's own DXF export can actually be opened within ACad). Now open in ACad and saveas to DWG so you can import into Impressions.

 

It would have been great if Impressions could directly import SVG, or even just DXF

[f700es]

Cool, glad you found a work around. Yes I would like ACAD to be able to use SVG files too. Weird that Impression can't use dxf files.I guess I would open the SVG in Adobe Illustrator and then save as a dwg. I might try it and see how that works.

 

Sean

[Cad64]

BTW, could we have the forum's rules adjusted to allow IRF files? The links in my previous post are to an outside server as this forum does not allow uploading of those files.

 

It's not a forum rule. I believe the type of images that can be uploaded is governed by the forum software. The only image file formats supported are GIF, JPG and PNG, as far as I know.

 

The way around this is to just put your files in a .zip and then upload that.