wow, sounds like you got swept up in a plot of your own!
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It feels so surreal, this thing that dropped out of the sky.
I’ve been going through a long process of major transition in my life, and this has been my experience in the past with these things, that there is always this Deus ex Machina situation where my whole life shifts in a totally unexpected way, but at the same time, I was preparing for it for the previous two years.
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My SIL is expecting, and in the course of asking what would be good to make for the baby, I found out she hates ducks. Not ducks the actual animal so much, but the saccharine cutesy ducks you find on baby stuff.
This grieved me, because I had just found a fab bootie pattern that makes it look like the baby has webbed bird’s feet. My SIL said she liked the pattern since it wasn’t saccharine, but since she doesn’t like ducks, I decided to make the booties electric turquoise, like so:
Lest anyone think I was trying to do an end run around the “no ducks” rule, I also made this card featuring no ducks, but birds with blue webbed feet:
The original pattern is free and may be found here:
http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEss10/PATTduck.php
ETA: The whole time I was making the booties, I was saying, “no ducks!” to myself in an Edna Mode (from The Incredibles) voice and giggling. Probably not a good look since so many people already think knitters are weird.
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Booby-booties. Perfect.
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This was a commission that I just did for a wedding. It’s the best thing that I’ve ever been asked to make. I’ve been wanting an excuse to get some bat wing scales so I took the opportunity to get some glow in the dark ones as well.
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That is awesome.
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Very nice.
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Bump-diddly-ump boardareenos.
I haven’t been doing much in the way of silly sketches recently since I’ve been writing my memories about my time in East Asia.
As for the Hydra Captain America: I’d love to see their current Evil Cap story end with him meeting some regular citizens and them all stating their regrets that he’s no longer a Nazi because he kicked “right kind of ass”. I want this because I hold no hope for humanity.
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cWondering if you guys can help me with a project.
I’m trying to digitize sewing patterns. Large scale line drawings that need to be geometrically accurate, but without significant detail less than 1/8 inch in size.
I have the f ollowing tools at my my disposal.
A flatbed scanner. Letter size.
A tripod capable of hoisting a camera about 4 feet off the floor.
A Aps-c camera, with a lens that tends to show barrel distortion at focal lengths less than 35mm.
an imac, with boot camp, and usb.
a small digitizing tablet, about 10" x 6"
various cad programs
I’ve thought of two possible solutions. Buying a used and obsolete drawing tablet about 12" x 12" and trying to piece together a usb–db9 interface.
a free equivalent to this:
any suggestions come to mind?
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Do you wish to print them out full size? What is your goal with these digital versions?
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A few options there. One could scan segments and then stitch the segments together in software. Re-create it entirely in software by measuring the original. Or making a photo of the whole thing and vectorizing the results. And no doubt others I haven’t thought of.
What I would try first is a combination of options two and three. Do a big, flat photo, and import that to Illustrator. Set the project to the desired size, scale the pants diagram photo size. Create another layer for defining the main points, and then use line or curve tools to connect the dots - basically tracing over the photo, and making any corrections or adjustments as necessary. One could also automatically vectorize the photo in Illustrator, if it is clean enough, but I prefer doing it manually.
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Is the problem that the scanner isn’t big enough to hold the full pattern?
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Due to the size of sewing patterns I think it might be hard to trace on a drawing tablet or scan on a typical scanner.
If you can get a picture with good contrast (like what they’re showing there), Inkscape’s Path -> Trace Bitmap… menu item should be able to convert it to a vector outline after which you could adjust the scale.
Making a board with measured dots on it like they show there could help with measuring to see if a picture is even, level, and not distorted. (Drop vertical and horizontal guidelines and adjust until it’s rectangular in image editor and figure out the scale.)
There are mobile apps that autocalculate the scale of an image (or things within it) if there is an object of known dimensions in it (like a coin, playing card, or CD), but I’m not aware of a PC program to do it. Measuring size of objects in an image with OpenCV describes how it’s done and some limitations - you might find some software based on that which could help, or some discussions about camera calibration. But that might be unnecessary. If you have a background board of known size, could just crop and scale to that size.
(Example with raster on the left, vector on the right)
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printing’s no problem No problem at all. I just need to get them into cad so I can manipulate them, reverse engineer them, etc.
And tracing’s no problem either. If I have a (large enough) graphics tablet, I can trace the patterns directly. If I have a scaled, perspective corrected image of the the thing, I can use the usual line, curve, bezier tools to draw.
It’s just that-- I don’t want to spend all my time working on individual 8 1/2" x 11" tiles of the thing, as the important elements are larger than letter size, and assembling a tiled raster image, without serious computer automation would drive me batty.
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basically, yes. Also, doing this in tiles increases the cumulative error. Larger scanners are pretty expensive.
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Hmmm…
What’s the body and lens? And what editing software do you have?
TBH I think a better question is, “How much money are you willing to sink into the project?”
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I would start with the camera, given the ability to use a long enough focal length to minimize distortion. Then you can work on keeping the piece straight when laid flat. Then find a vertical distance for the camera to capture the whole board.
I assume the tripod doesn’t have attachments to get lateral far enough, or high enough to easily get a perpendicular view. Find a way to affix the feet of the tripod to the ceiling?
Or take an oblique view and fix the perspective in software? Mark your table with rectangular registration marks so you can line things up.
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nikon D7000, 18-55 kit lens. (My lens collection is heavily biased towards telephotos and supertelephotos) I still use Aperture.
Nothing special in terms of software, I’m afraid. Draftsight, SVG, python for CAD. I like stuff with permissive licenses and source code.
And I’m a cheapskate…
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I’m thinking that’s the best solution. The tripod has an inverted mode, but that only gets me about a meter between camera and subject.
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