What programs can do this-

[july_favre]

IM looking for a program that can take a picture and turn it into a drawing of plotted dots(I forgot the name the type of drawing) and save it as a format that I can put into a cam program, or maybe make the g-code in the same program.
Im sure theres something simple out there for this.
Thanks

[Splint]

Do a search for raster to vector.

[Aksess]

Are you referring to stimpling? If so DrMetza is what you need

[Evodyne]

Not really sure what you want. I took Paint Shp Pro and a stock picture and did a greyscale half-tone conversion. Finally I reduced that to 2-bit color depth. Is this what you were thinking?

Evodyne

[july_favre]

Evodyne- Pretty much like that, but with all the dots a consistant diameter. I was messing with some programs and did and came out with the same sort of thing, but its not exactly what I wanted.

aksess- i will check out that program

[july_favre]

aksess do you have a link?

[Geof]

I think what you are looking for is something that can take a picture and turn it into a mesotint. I think that is the correct term; it is a black and white version of pointilism where the grey scale in an image is obtained from the density of blacks dots all the same size. I do not know of anything comercially available to do this.

[cbass]

Originally Posted by Geof I think what you are looking for is something that can take a picture and turn it into a mesotint. I think that is the correct term; it is a black and white version of pointilism where the grey scale in an image is obtained from the density of blacks dots all the same size. I do not know of anything comercially available to do this.

Hey Geof,

I think he's looking for a halftone, or at least that's what its called in screen printing. The following are examples...

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtc...r/halftone.gif

http://www.ccsn.nevada.edu/cg/kanet/...one_screen.htm


You can do it in Photoshop (I use 6.0). Image->Mode->Bitmap. Then choose halftone from the drop down. Just make sure you first convert your image to grayscale. You can then specify size shape and frequency of your "dots". Then it will need to be converted to vector, unless your CAM can read raster.

Good luck!

Carlo

[mrservo]

If you just want to reduce a picure to fine dots, just use a standard program
like PhotoShop. There are Mezzotint filters one can use or play around
with diffusion dithering in the program. all the best.

[july_favre]

Ok, I got some ok results with the halftone, so how would I get the points compatable with a cam?

[cbass]

Originally Posted by july_favre Ok, I got some ok results with the halftone, so how would I get the points compatable with a cam?

You can save your work as a TIF, JPG, GIF or other raster file. You'll then need to convert this to a Vector file (DWG, DXF etc). You will need a raster to vector converter to do this. Try searching for a demo or shareware.

Realize that in doing so, you will essentially be creating outlines of your half tone dots. These outlines will then become the tool paths in your CAM file.


Carlo

[oldjohn]

G'day
See my avatar. I Got a photo from the net and processed it in PotoShop and saved it as AutoCad 14, opened in ACad and saved it as DXF, then opened it in Mastercam 8, got the toolpath and nc file from it. It took me many months and many software programs as well as hours and long nights to get there. What I can tell you. If you want to do some venturing into this mater you will need the tools. There is not a magic wand.
Good luck
John