Customer asking to drive engraving paths from a picture?

[bob1112]

Making some automotive parts for a customer and they want us to take a picture and derive simple engraving line paths from it and put that in the part! I don't have a clue. I have not done much engraving anyway but I am sure I can program that without issue if I have clean lines to bring into MCX. Need to know what file type I need and how to create the lines.

I have photoshop, illustrator, and a couple other photo programs. Has anyone done this? Not looking to color the whole picture here, just create simple profile lines and such.

[seijack]

You will need some sort of raster to vector conversion software. I believe the Art module within Mastercam will do this. If you do not have Art then do a search for raster to vector conversion. Basically this software traces the light and dark areas of the raster image and places lines and arcs in those areas creating lines you can select for toolpathing.. the cheapest is not usually the best..

[cadcam]

What version of MC are you running as there is a free chook in Mill called "Rastovec.dll" that will help you with this/ I have done this for years.

[mafitch7479]

depending on the picture, you should just be able to open it in illustrator and export it as a dxf to open in Mastercam. I do it that way very often. Usually you'll end up with just one long spline, but if you spend a bit of time in illustrator putting each segment in a different layer, it'll come in as spline segments.

[johnny cd]

What version of MC are you running as there is a free chook in Mill called "Rastovec.dll" that will help you with this/ I have done this for years.

Would you be so kind to elaborate on how you go about using this chook?I have v9 and have seen it, but am unsure how to use it.Thanks in advance
Johnny

[cadcam]

Well Johnny it maters what version of V9 as it was an add-on cost in the early stages of V9. Do you know how to run a Chook?

[johnny cd]

Well Johnny it maters what version of V9 as it was an add-on cost in the early stages of V9. Do you know how to run a Chook?

I had a look today, with no joy.It comes up in the help menu , but if you bring up the chooks menu by pressing alt c, its not there.I have another harddrive with v9 on, will look and see if it is on there, but as it was an early upgrade from v8, the chances are i am out of luck.