How To Clean Up a Traced Bitmap Image in Vision Pro 8 Engraving Software

How To Clean Up a Traced Bitmap Image in Vision Pro 8 Engraving Software

In last week’s blog post, we took a look at how to vectorize a bitmap image in Vision Pro 8 software. This week, we’ll look at how to clean up a bitmap that’s been traced using Vision Pro 8.

Screen shot 1: Our original bitmap and the traced result.
The traced result is a group of objects. Select the result and click on “Ungroup” in the Layout menu.

Screen Shot 2: Shown here are the different objects after the ungroup. There are 5 main objects and some tiny ones from the trademark.

Screen Shot 3: Here we’ve ungrouped the result and deleted objects we don’t need. We deleted objects 1 and 2 and the tiny objects from the trademark.

Screen Shot 4: Select all objects and click on “Make Path” in the Arrange menu.
Now the objects are all combined into one object. This object is ready to be used in a job.

Screen Shot 5: You can just engrave the outlines or fill the graphic with a toolpath and engrave it as a relief. The image below shows an S-Sweep toolpath applied to the object. It is often desirable to use Node editing to modify the traced result. This can make the engraving process quicker and also drastically improve the quality.

Screen Shot 6: Here we have zoomed in on the ear and double-clicked on the object to see the nodes. This means removing excess nodes to make lines and curves cleaner.

Screen Shot 7: To clean up the inner ear section, select the object and click on “Duplicate” in the Edit menu. Select the duplicate object and left-click on any color in the palette at the bottom other than the original one so that the 2 objects are different colors. 

Screen Shot 8: Here, our original color is Black and the duplicate is now Red. 

Screen Shot 9: Now select both objects and click on the Alignment tool.
This brings up Alignment options. Click on the center top-to-bottom and the center left-to-right options.

Screen Shot 10: Click off to deselect all objects. You should now have both objects centered in the plate with your duplicate on top.

Screen Shot 11: While holding down “Control,” left-click on the color of the original image in the palette at the bottom. This will disable that color. Black is now disabled. We can edit the nodes of the Red object and the Black object will remain the same. Now we can remove nodes and move them around to clean up the Red object using the Black object as our guide.

Screen Shot 12: Zoom in on the inner ear part again, then double-click on it to see the nodes. We only need a few nodes to make this shape, not the many we see here.

Screen Shot 13: Deleting extra nodes is sometimes referred to as “Node Reduction”. You can select one node at a time or hold down “Shift” and select as many as you want. The selected nodes turn Red. Here, we’ve selected many nodes to delete.

Screen Shot 14: Press the delete key on your computer and all selected nodes are deleted. You can see the shape still looks mostly the same as the guide shape (black dotted lines) but it has significantly fewer nodes. You now can move the nodes around if you need to match the original better.

Screen Shot 15: Finish editing the nodes in all areas of the object then click on the “Apply” button at the top to apply your changes. (If you are working on large project, you may want to apply changes in segments, just in case something goes wrong.)

Screen Shot 16: Now hold “Control” and left-click on the disabled color to enable it again. Now select your original graphic and delete it.

ORIGINAL NODES

NODES CLEANED UP

You now have a cleaner copy of the object. A cleaner copy will always engrave faster and the quality will be greatly improved!

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