A friend of mine owns a Plasmacam. He enjoys scanning pictures and drawings for machine cutting. Problem is that it requires hours of manual cleanup after the image is converted to vector format. The vector images are very "squiggly" ,not smooth toolpaths that the machine can cut. He has tried a couple of different raster to vector convertors with little success. He says that the Plasmacam software works best, but still very tedious. I have not had a chance to root through all of the options in the Plasmacam software for him. Hoping that someone here can suggest raster to vector convertor that works good or help point out tools or settings within Plasmacam software to automatically cleanup toolpaths

You just discovered the gap between marketing and the real world. There is no "easy Button" for converting scanned images to vectors. Either you cut it all ragged, or spend the time to clean up the scanned image and more time to clean up the auto trace. Line drawings of simple artwork with distinct color or B&W edges work pretty good (and that is what is used for demo and sales illustration) but low resolution images (less than 300 DPI native resolution) or aliased photos are a joke. Seldom in the real world are you presented with a high resolution line drawing type image to work from.

The solution is not more software or different settings. It's to build your artwork in a program (drawing program) that has good vector drawing tools and will import the bitmap file. You lay a "layer" over the bitmap and hand trace to get what you want. It's slow going at first but as you learn the tools and tricks the tracing goes faster and faster and you get to know where to make objects and what will cut and what won't.

I do a training course that teaches how to get from an idea to a plasma or router table quickly. I use CorelDraw for artwork and hand tracing. From there a nice clean DXF goes to SheetCAM for toolpathing and then to MACH or EMC.

Since we do decorative cutting commercially if there were a magic solution I would buy it (and I have tried a LOT of programs) but the truth is they all have problems with anything not simple images.....when you need auto trace the most!

Tom Caudle
www.CandCNC.com

I also own a PlasmaCAM, and the best way that I have found to have clean cut lines are to clean up the photo or image before moving it into PlasmaCAM

In some cases that means using other programs to limit colors, improve line quality or line thickness. Or, sometimes I use the old stand by, light table - where you trace the image with a "dull felt tip pen" and then scan in the resulting image for conversion via PlasmaCam.

Also, PlamaCAM a "smooth" function but even then it works best where cut lines are represented as high quality (thicker) lines in the starting image.

Remember, PlasmaCAM does not need very smooth lines for most cuts, but very jagged line with tend to slow the cut speed and therefore some detail will tend to melt away in the process. For photo impressions or cartoons this is not normally a problem, but for geometric shapes it can be a concern.

Eldonb46

I personally love the whole open source software concept. There is an open source software called Inkscape which has a wonderful bitmap trace button that will automatically trace bitmaps and change them to vectors. It's awesome.This kid has a really good video up showing it. If you don't love it I'll give your money back.

YouTube - Auto-Tracing!