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AutoTrace elements dialog

AutoTrace elements dialog

This dialog will be prompted when you use one of these functions included in the Startup dialog:

• 'Cut Parts'
• 'Cut Nested Parts'
• 'Cut Along Vector'
• 'Cut a new Tapered Part'

then you select a raster (Gif, Jpeg, Bmp, Png, Tif, Tga, Pcx) file and the "Selection dialog when a you import Raster elements..." option included in the Setting menu of the Startup dialog is enabled.

Suggestions for a good raster image:

1. Use a White backgound and trace the elements in Black. The greater the color difference between the background and the elements, the better the process will work!
2. If you are going to cut Parts, them must be filled with the same colour of the contour.
3. If you are going to cut vectos, them must be drawn the the same color and not using a too thick line.
4. Bigger resolutions (DPI) will give better results, but longer processing time. We suggest don't go over 5.000 x 5.000 pixels, also if the application can process larger files

If you follow these suggestions, you have good chances to have success.

The basic ideas of this dialog are:

Check and select the elements you are going to cut

You will see the validated Elements in the list and in the 2D preview.
If the result is different than expected, read below "Note: If no Elements or bad elements are included you can"
If you see multiple parts, and you want:

• to select only one of them, we suggest to click the desired Element (this will select it also in the Filtered elements list), then press the Keep only selected element button.
• to select only some of them, we suggest to click one by one the unwanted Elements (this will select it also in the Filtered elements list), then press the Delete selected element button.

You can go back to all the element pressing the Tracing again all elements button

If the result is not what you expected, press the Advanced: Abort and go to manually fix... to open the actual situation in a Cad document, so that you could fix the problem by hand.

Change the size of the elements

You can rescale the elements in this way:

• click the Element you want to use as a reference for the size, this will select it also in the Filtered elements list. Now you can see the actual Width and Height of the selected Element in the edit controls
• insert the desired Width or Height, then press the related <- Rescale To button

Note: the same scale will be applied to All the elements

You can also select not to display any more this dialog next time, and you see there also how to enable it again, if you like.

When you finished just press OK to go to the next cutting dialog.

Note: If no Elements or bad elements are included you can:

• Try a different Thresold value. Thresold: as the first internal stage of preprocessing is converting the raster image to a 2 color image (Black/White), we must specify the value that divide what we will be considered as White from what will be Black. This is the Thresold value. Its range goes from 0 to 255. The original pixel values are 0 for Full Black and 255 for Full White, so generally a good Thresold value could be 128 (the middle value). The application when this dialog starts compute apply a medium = 128 bvalue, so generally you haven't to take care about it if you used as suggestes a Black/White image!
  Then press the Tracing again all elements button
• Retrace or modify the image in Raster application like Windows Paint, following the Suggestions desribed just above

If you have a good knowledge about the autotracing world, press the Tracing settings, the Tracing settings dialog will be displayed, where you can fine tune the way the elements are traced.
To debug the Autotracing process, you can use the Show the original image combo box,  you can select one of these views:

• Show the original image - you see the original image in Black/Gray and the Traced elements in Red
• Show the preprocessed image - you see the preprocessed image in Black/Gray and the Traced elements in Red
• Show the preproc. image (no traced pixels) - you see the preprocessed image in Black/Gray, but the already traced pixels are hidden.  And the Traced elements in Red 

See also: I have some picture of the parts I want to cut. How can devFoam help me?

I suggest also to take a look at this page, to better understand some important concepts of devFoam: DevFoam FAQ and important concepts