Solidworks How?

[Wjman]

Hi All,
I'm a bit of a 'Newbie' to Solidworks. My boss says that he wants me to learn it so I can use it at work. Anyway after going through the tutorials, I think I am getting to grips with it.
I would like to get a drawing of a dragonfly and make a dxf/dwg out of it to cut the outline on a waterjet machine, I have tried scanning an image, converting it to a TIFF file and inserting it into a Solidworks drawing, but I keep on getting an 'error reading file' message. Can anyone shed any light on this, and offer some help. I hope to apply the same method to various other pictures, (flowers, birds etc)
thanks for any help
Mark...

P.S. Perhaps there is another program that is better suited to this
application? Thanks...

[Rekd]

You need to convert the raster image, (bmp), to vector (dxf, iges etc).
There's a few programs that do this, wintopo has a freeware one that's barely OK, one of the adobe products which I don't remember the name of off hand works well, and Mastercam has a c-hook to do it. There's others as well.

'Rekd

[creative_mind]

Adobe Illustrator

[Rekd]

Originally posted by woody5 Adobe Illustrator

Yeah, what he said.

I think it's only in v9 and above, but I might be wrong. (at least the 'stable' one)

'Rekd

[dherbman]

Use the graphic as a sketch bitmap and trace it using 3 point arcs and lines. Splines would be faster, but the gcode resulting may be reduced to very small line sements. Arcs and lines produce a predictable path. Arcs also seem to transition into arcs much smoother than line segments due to ramp up/down being executed for each micro movement. Arcs may requires hundreds of line segments to produce an acceptable appearance. This has a huge impact on program length as well. 100 line segments = 100 lines of gcode vs 1 line of gcode to execute an arc.

[ebolamonk]

I'm having the same problem. You should be able to insert a raster image without any problems. There's even an auto trace feature for creating vector geometry by tracing over your picture. It'd sure be nice to be able to use it...

[DareBee]

This is a 4 year old thread that you just resurrected!

SW 08 definitely has more features than 03 or 04 did.

[ebolamonk]

I noticed the oldness afterwords, but it doesn't change my problem with the program. Now that it's resurrected, do you have a solution to the problem?

[DareBee]

You will need to use autotrace or some other raster to vector converter. There are free programs available for this on download.com (raster to vector) or you can use adobe illustrator.