What up ENGI 210 fam. This week we had to trace a movement from 507 mechanical movements in order to prepare it for laser cutting in the future. It’s a pretty dope website, check it out. Here’s the one that I chose to do after flipping through 354 of the 507 mech movements.
Pretty lit right? As that outer ring rotates, the small post affixed to the outer edge runs through the infinity sign moving it up and down at a constant rate. When I first heard we had this project, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake, taking me at most half an hour. Thus, I pushed it off to the last minute (makes sense right?). Bad decision. This one turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I turns out that pixels do not like to become vectored easily. RIP. But anyway, I started this journey by trying the simple image trace function but quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work. Upon closer inspection of the trace, I found out that the “paths” I wanted were actually filled shapes.
Closer Up
Far Away View of Image Trace
This is when I knew I needed a new strategy. I could probably eventually get the image trace to work better for this application but I figured out that I could create a better and more accurate trace using shapes and the shape builder tool. After deciding this I went to work tracing all of the easy to trace shapes: the outer ring, the outer edge of the guide, and the sliding rod and rod guides. Once I had these shapes I moved on to the more difficult part, the infinity shape of the guide. I opened the file in Adobe Fireworks, an easy to use pixel based program to delete all of the lines except for the infinity shape and outline.
Once I had this shape I threw it back into Illustrator and redid the image trace using the silhouette option. This gave me the rough shapes of the infinity sign that I then used the pen tool to shape and refine. I realize now that it would have been much easier to just trace the outline within illustrator directly over the original image instead of editing it in Fireworks, tracing it in illustrator, and then creating the outline myself, but hindsight is 20/20. Once I had this shape, I had all of the outlines required to laser cut this mechanism. It then overlaid all of my custom created outlines on top of the original image to ensure everything looked good and was in it’s correct position
Outline overlay on original image.
My outline
After this I was done. I had a pretty accurate trace of the mechanism that is more or less is the same as the original movement. I definitely feel more comfortable using Illustrator after doing this and I realize that it sucks to convert a pixelated image to a vectored image. Also don’t procrastinate kids, it’s not a good plan.
