Re: calling all uber geeks

Barry, here is my experience with this problem - it may or may not work for you depending on your CAD program. I have AutoCAD, DataCAD and DeltaCAD ($50 at deltacad.com) and use DeltaCAD almost exclusively, mostly because it's so easy to use. The following works in DeltaCAD.

Open a new drawing and insert a JPEG of the Photo. Manually trace the image. Remove the JPEG layer. Scale the entire drawing to match the real size of the product and save the file.

I've have found that some programs can be used to rasterize a JPEG and save as a DXF file but my experience is that every little nuance becomes a small line and the size of the file become unmanagable - not to mention the huge number of lines it generates.

This is crude but effective in some circumstances - it may or may not be useful for your purposes.

n
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Barry Kleider
  To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
  Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 8:50 PM
  Subject: calling all uber geeks

  Here's a wild problem:

  I need to convert one of my digital photos to a .stl file - the file type used in CAD programs.

  Has anyone ever done this sort of thing?

  I'm doing some more of those tactile graphics - bas relief and such - and came across a Titan FDM from Stratysys. It's a machine which is used to make 3D prototypes from CAD files.

  I'm guessing, but here's my logic: my photo image and the the CAD image share some common parameters in that they are both visual maps.... Isa there a way to save them in .stl format?

  OR I may need to print out my .TIF or .JPEG files and load them into a CAD program as scans.

  (Maybe I just solved my own problem.)

  Barry
  Barry Kleider
  Photographer. Arts Educator.
  612.722.9701
  email: bkleider@sihope.com
  Web: www.barryphotography.com
Received on Tue Apr 20 07:10:33 2004