Tools yo are using to tansfer a poster board template

[DezertBlingMoto]

im curious on what tools make the job easier.I'm new to this world of CAD etc. and was just curious how everyone is transferring (or if) from a paper template/drawing?

Q: how do you determine a radius ,on a poster board cutout ?

An Example: Like a shock tower for a 4 linked rear end, theres a radius that travels pretty much from the top to the bottom in small increments.Any help I highly appreciative.

Tools I have in possession: micrometer, tape measure , angel finder, and I believe that's all I have on hand.

[I Lean]

My best luck has been to trace the template onto a sheet of graph paper, that way it's pretty easy to take points and input them to CAD.

[DezertBlingMoto]

My best luck has been to trace the template onto a sheet of graph paper, that way it's pretty easy to take points and input them to CAD.

excellent thank you

[stillworkin]

if you have a scanner, then you can trace it onto paper and scan the image. if you scan it in as a .pdf you can import the pdf into AutoCAD at a scale of 1:1. Once you've got the pdf imported into AutoCAD then just use lines or arcs or splines to trace the image. If the parts are larger than your scanner then put them on several pieces of paper and scan each of them in. Then you can trace each one and then move them into place in AutoCAD using the original templates dimensions to make sure they are assembled correctly.

[Stout]

I typically take a picture with my phone. Include something for scale, like a tape measure. Parallax can be reduced by distance so moving the camera further away from the drawing will reduce it.

[Gamelord]

Take a picture and then scan it into Corel (same as above). For something that is more complex or hard to get a decent picture of to trace, just cut one out of cardboard and trim it until it fits perfectly, then scan that into your scanner and import it into your drawing program for trace. You can use heavy grade construction paper as well because it is easier to cut with scissors.

If the piece is to large to fit on your small scanner, scan it in pieces (top, middle, bottom, side, side, etc...) then open all the individual scans in your drawing program (I use Corel) and put them together like a big digital jigsaw puzzle. Once all together, trace as one piece. Just make sure that every piece is scanned and imported as 1 to 1 and to make it easier, I draw a couple of marks on the piece in various places that is being scanned so that when I put all the individual scans together, I just have to line up the small marks to make sure they are exact.


Hope that helps.

[plain ol Bill]

Don't know if any of you have been on the Yahoo support group for Sheetcam lately or not. If you haven't there is some discussion going on about a way to scan templates into a .dxf file using a new software package by the developer of Sheetcam. It is called Scanything and works inside Mach3 using a USB camera. Very interesting!

[retiredcpo]

on parts that are small enough I place the part directly on my scanner
scan the parts and import the image into cad and then trace it out
retiredcpo

[HammerDownJustin]

Don't know if any of you have been on the Yahoo support group for Sheetcam lately or not. If you haven't there is some discussion going on about a way to scan templates into a .dxf file using a new software package by the developer of Sheetcam. It is called Scanything and works inside Mach3 using a USB camera. Very interesting!

Very cool I want to go search for this..thank you bill

[danny]

on parts that are small enough I place the part directly on my scanner
scan the parts and import the image into cad and then trace it out
retiredcpo

This works even better if you leave the lid up on the scanner. it makes a reverse black and white.
Danny

[_Ogre]

i've been using cad since 94 and i have to say i've never used a template. templates are pre-cad, measurements work better than templates. i can take a few measurements and a picture and draw it in autocad. print full scale and check what fits and where you need to modify.

the shop guys bring me templates all the time. i go see what their working on, take my measurements, draw it up and hand them the print. 95% of the time that's all it takes, 5% of the time i have to modify the dwg. you must think in cad, not think in how you did it back then.

usually the measurements don't lie.

[cindy carlisle]

This is really cool, we have a similiar program on our tables, it uses a lazer to trace not a camera.
If they get all the bugs worked out, with this program, it will be awesome!!! This will be great for people who can not trace with a CAD program......just like ours is.

http://youtu.be/_HbINRUN2Ig

[motoguy]

I typically take a picture with my phone. Include something for scale, like a tape measure. Parallax can be reduced by distance so moving the camera further away from the drawing will reduce it.

I just traced a 40" x 40" butterfly template, given to me by a customer. They have 6 different designs. After tracing, getting it cleaned up, and getting it in...I find out that parallax error has hosed me. I used the pen on my table to draw one out, and while certain aspects are perfect, other aspects are visibly shifted. Unfortunately, there are some dimensional aspects to this, so they need to be the same size as the templates.

Poop.

I do have scananything, so I can try that on my table. The way these things have been marked on, white-outed, taped and patched, etc...I don't know that Scananything is going to be able to deal with it. It's been a while since I used it, and it was a finicky beyotch.

My photos were taken with a Rebel t3, with Canon EFS 18-55mm lens. I see the "move the camera farther away" idea, mentioned above. The photos I took had the lens about 4ft away from the subject matter. I'll scoot the camera farther away, and see if that helps. If I scoot the camera as far as possible, as use zoom to fill the screen/get the most image possible, will that work?

[tnbndr]

The way these things have been marked on, white-outed, taped and patched, etc.

Since they are already marked up, can't you paint them black to help in your trace?

[tcaudle]

Cameras have some lens distortion on the edges so making the image fill baout 70% of the area helps bu the most important thing is to have the camera square to the object (90 degrees) in both planes. The best example is standing at the base of a tall building and taking a picture pointing up and the top of the building looks more narrow than the base. In the original find and mark the approx center of the object . If you can draw a vertical line and a horizontal line though the center. It does not have to be perfectly centered but the lines need to be at 90 degrees where they cross.

Once a picture has been digitized (turned into lines and objects) there are things you can to to make it right. Use the dimensioning tools in Corel or the CAD tool and compare that to you master top and bottom and on the sides. You should be able to adjust your drawing to have its lines right and to have the same size and measurement from the lines. If you group the objects and do any stretching do it on all of the object at first then make any minor moves on the internal cuts if it needs to be accurate.

We have had to do signs for buildings and before we made the first cut we had to show the client what it would look like on their building. A photo as far back as we can and then picking a vertical and horizontal line and editing the photo so it gets rid of the parallax errors, then superimposing the sign onto the building shows them what it will actually look like.

A really handy drafting tool (old school) is a set if dividers and a drawing compass. You can find the radius of a curve using a couple of geometric methods with just a compass if you have a drawing or template. Pick any two points on the arc; construct the perpendicular bisector of the line between them. Do the same for another two points on the arc; where these two lines meet is the center of the radius of the arc. You could do that in the CAD program as well .

[muzza]

I do pretty much as you have stated, Take the photo, square on from as far away as practical and zoom to the picture but first draw some grid lines at 100 centres on the image to be photographed and traced.
I then bring it into Corel, you can then use these grid lines to scale it on your page. ie if the lines are 115 mm it means it is 15% too large so scale down by 86.95% etc. If you're using inches it the same but the maths is just a bit harder
It will be distorted as you said but I use the envelope tool and the lines in the image with the grid to bring it back into correct parallax.
And then trace

I see you have X7 so it might not be on it but in X8 there is also the perspective tool to help bring images back to a 2D format which can help at times like this.
Murray

[motoguy]

I'll have to look at the envelope tool. Maybe that will be my saving grace.

I moved the camera as far away as I could, such that full zoom still had the subject taking up the viewfinder. Taped a ruler to the wall as well, for scale. Imported, scaled a 1" line so that it matched the ruler, and drew it out on the table to overlay the original. Still off. Playing with the scaling a bit helped, but where some areas would be dead on, others would be off. And I grew tired of dinking with fractions of a % scale, drawing it on the table, and comparing (built a home made light box from some sawhorses and a piece of plexiglass I have lying around). So...I laid fresh paper over the customer templates, and traced by hand with a sharpie. Took these to the table and scanned in with Scananything. Customer drawings were too marked up/boogered up to have worked with Scananything. Needless to say, I'll be losing my ass on computer time on this one.

Luckily, Scananything helped me resolve an issue I'd been having. The camera was bouncing all over the place. I traced it through the Z to the motor, and found that my gear mesh on my Y axis was a bit loose in a section of gear track (the section I most commonly cut on). I tightened the mesh up, the wobble in the camera went away, and I suspect an issue I'll have with wobbles on some X-Y transitions (probably in that affected section of rail) will clear up, too.

Next time I'll draw a full geometric shape (square) to use to scale, vs just a line. Then I'll have to deal with the distortion, but hopefully some Google/Youtube time will give me an idea of the capabilities of the Envelope tool.

FWIW, after using scananything again (last time was months ago), I've decided I love CorelDraw.

1) Import raw DXF with eleventy billion nodes.
2) in CorelDraw, select nodes, and reduce nodes. Keeping same part selected, keep reducing nodes 5-6 times, until it doesn't reduce further.
3) In CorelDraw, use smoothing tool to take remaining nodes from eleventy billion, to a manageable number. It basically seems to be a "best fit line for average of nodes" type of tool, which is exactly what I was looking for when I found it.

I HATE it when a "simple" task turns into an ass kicker. I'm having mine handed to me on this job. Then again, this single job will pay more than a weeks salary from my previous employer. So, I guess even if it takes me MUCH longer than anticipated, I'm still doing ok.

[motoguy]

This is really cool, we have a similiar program on our tables, it uses a lazer to trace not a camera.
If they get all the bugs worked out, with this program, it will be awesome!!! This will be great for people who can not trace with a CAD program......just like ours is.

http://youtu.be/_HbINRUN2Ig

This looks very similar to the "trace" program offered by Burntables...which is crap. All you're doing is manually marking points. May be great for a simplistic object, but would take FOREVER on something like this:

Particularly when I find out it needs to be dimensional, and not just "artwork"...

[motoguy]

The way these things have been marked on, white-outed, taped and patched, etc.

Since they are already marked up, can't you paint them black to help in your trace?

Creating solid lines, adding white out, etc would have (IMO) taken longer than just hand tracing and starting with a clean template. Customer was supposed to supply me with "clean, high contrast template black lines on white paper". What I received was a template with multiple revisions, white out, white out tape, arrows pointing to correct lines, etc...with the "correct line" traced over in a sharpie. Seeing how Scananything did with my "re-traced clean copies", it would have been a nightmare to have Scananything attempt to trace their mess of a template.

[motoguy]

Cameras have some lens distortion on the edges so making the image fill baout 70% of the area helps bu the most important thing is to have the camera square to the object (90 degrees) in both planes. <snip> In the original find and mark the approx center of the object . If you can draw a vertical line and a horizontal line though the center. It does not have to be perfectly centered but the lines need to be at 90 degrees where they cross.

The part in bold helps. I was attempting to make the image fill 100% of the veiwfinder. Perhaps going down to 70% would have lessened the effect. That would also have let me move the camera further away, vs the roughly 10ft distance used.

[muzza]

Cameras have some lens distortion on the edges so making the image fill baout 70% of the area helps bu the most important thing is to have the camera square to the object (90 degrees) in both planes. <snip> In the original find and mark the approx center of the object . If you can draw a vertical line and a horizontal line though the center. It does not have to be perfectly centered but the lines need to be at 90 degrees where they cross.

The part in bold helps. I was attempting to make the image fill 100% of the veiwfinder. Perhaps going down to 70% would have lessened the effect. That would also have let me move the camera further away, vs the roughly 10ft distance used.

Correct, the further away from the centre of the lens, the greater the distortion. With the photo quality from modern cameras you can crop away the outer area to leave the less distorted part to adjust and trace.

[RAD]

Pick any two points on the arc; construct the perpendicular bisector of the line between them. Do the same for another two points on the arc; where these two lines meet is the center of the radius of the arc.

I've learned something that can be useful, thanks!

[tcaudle]

There are other drafting methods of finding the radius of an arc one of which is using a drawing compass . I have been known to draw a circle in CorelDraw and use a corner adjust (shrink/stretch) until the circle fits the arc correctly and then just read the diameter in the object box at the top and divide by two. You can modify a corner of a square or rectangle to have a radius with a defined radius by using the node edit and the Fillet/Scallop/Chamfer tool. When you trace you can just connect the two ends of an arc with a straight line then change it to an Arc in the node edit and grab the handles and drag it to fit the bitmap you are tracing. Auto trace is okay but hand tracing (digitizing) a scan or photo lets you do things that auto trace can't always do.