How would you clean this up?

[badun 3]

I have the attached vector that was made for screen printing. The owner asked me to produce vinyl decals from it. I'm fairly new to cutting and so far all the work I've done has been from my own designs so the shapes have so far been cutter-friendly. The software I have available is Inkscape, SignCut, and Make The Cut. I am not asking anyone to do this for me, but I would be very appreciative if someone took the time to explain how they would make this cutter-ready. Left to my own designs, I would probably use Inkscape to adjust the nodes into more distinct shapes (e.g change the swoops into individual polygons per letter), but before I do that I am curious as to how a pro would do this. Thanks for any assistance!Spirit Logo.svg

[Jay2703 704]

Here is what I was able to do with the .svg file:

Jay

spirit1.EPS

[badun 3]

Here's the eps version and thanks!

Spirit Logo.eps

[badun 3]

Here is what I was able to do with the .svg file:

Jay

Jay, can you describe what you did? Not that I don't appreciate the file, of course, but I hope to learn from this so next time I will know what to do without futzing around for hours.

[mars 45]

I have the attached vector that was made for screen printing. The owner asked me to produce vinyl decals from it. I'm fairly new to cutting and so far all the work I've done has been from my own designs so the shapes have so far been cutter-friendly. The software I have available is Inkscape, SignCut, and Make The Cut. I am not asking anyone to do this for me, but I would be very appreciative if someone took the time to explain how they would make this cutter-ready. Left to my own designs, I would probably use Inkscape to adjust the nodes into more distinct shapes (e.g change the swoops into individual polygons per letter), but before I do that I am curious as to how a pro would do this. Thanks for any assistance!Spirit Logo.svg

If you have Inkscape and Make The Cut! this is how I would do it.

Open the .svg in Inkscape

Select All and export selection to bitmap - I used .png

Use the pixel trace in MTC! select the trace by color option and I started with blue - adjusted the despeck to remove any extra stray tiny shapes.

I also did a resample to increase resolution and then import the blue trace

Next do red using the color trace again - import the red trace.

Now you have the file in two colors you can cut is as is - but the blue outline of the letters outside of the star are pretty thin. Might be a good idea to make a white layer for the inner part of the letters and layer the vinyl.

I can't attach the .mtc file - but here is a .png of the file - I could email you the file if you need it.

-Mike

[Jay2703 704]

Jay, can you describe what you did? Not that I don't appreciate the file, of course, but I hope to learn from this so next time I will know what to do without futzing around for hours.

It took some time to do because the was a lot of excess junk. I opened the .svg file in Inkscape (it is vector already). I saved it out as an .eps file and imported it to SignBlazer. Sorted through the layers to figure out what was needed and what wasn't. Then it was a matter of determining how the layering would work. I put white on the bottom with Blue and Red laying on top of the white background. I worked with the geometry that was there, splitting and combining different elements and using Arrange + Weld + Punch Through to get the final results. It took me about a half hour to forty five minutes total to get what you see. It is the actual geometry that you provided.

[badun 3]

Thank you all for the suggestions and effort, it is greatly appreciated! The owner of the file is a printer by trade but does not do design or graphics. His comment was "Damn designers have no consideration for what it takes to actually work with these things!" It is somewhat a relief to know this required real effort to resolve - and the technique of taking it to raster and then back to vector is clever.

Thanks again!

[Jay2703 704]

Thank you all for the suggestions and effort, it is greatly appreciated! The owner of the file is a printer by trade but does not do design or graphics. His comment was "Damn designers have no consideration for what it takes to actually work with these things!" It is somewhat a relief to know this required real effort to resolve - and the technique of taking it to raster and then back to vector is clever.

Thanks again!

the SVG file you provided was a vector image. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. There is a definite difference in how things are designed for print compared to how they are designed for cutting. For print you can hide things using layers that you would not get away with when cutting. That is why this file was difficult to clean up for cutting.

[mars 45]

the SVG file you provided was a vector image. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. There is a definite difference in how things are designed for print compared to how they are designed for cutting. For print you can hide things using layers that you would not get away with when cutting. That is why this file was difficult to clean up for cutting.

Jay2703,

That's what I saw when I pulled in the .svg - the stars and stripes were a layer that only showed through the letters - I tried layering and joining/welding to make a cuttable vector image - I fiddled with it for a couple of TV shows worth of time and got a result that was OK - there were white areas where the red stripes intersected the blue and I couldn't imagine describing the process to a noobie in without confusing the hell out of him - so I finally just exported from InkScape to .png and then traced the bitmap back into a vector shape it did pretty well - I look closely at the file I got and see some stray white spots along the juncture with the blue - would take just a bit more work to get it better. Also the stars aren't as sharp as they could be - fixable to be sure - just didn't want to spend all night on it. The good thing about using the MTC! "pixel-tracing" tool was it took less than 5 minutes to convert the .png to vector -

-Mike

badun - glad it helped. Are you cutting with MTC! or just designing with it?

[roxanneupnorth 106]

Sometimes you can enlarge a vector 5x, 10x, etc., rasterize it and then auto trace it back to vector.....Then use your magic wand tool to pick the colours you want to cut......Harder with 2 or more colours but works great for 1 colour with a lot of overlapping paths....

[badun 3]

I actually know more than I may have indicated in my first post. Where I lack experience is in the intuitive manipulation of objects that don't fit neatly into a cutting program. When I make my own I am, of course, making them as simple as possible. The ones I've converted from rasters either were simple to clean up with MTC! or Inkscape; this is the first one I've gotten in vector format that clearly was not designed for cutting. My friend (and file owner) has a lot of years in the production end of printing so his comment was directed at designers who draw in a vacuum and don't consider how the image will be used. Apparently he sees a lot of this in the business.

To answer the question about MTC!, my year's license of SignCut is almost over so I bought MTC! as a possible replacement. I think it's worth the price just for the raster to vector conversion, though. I have not used it to cut anything other than some simple geometric test patters to ensure it was compatible with my cutter (a US Cutter Refine) before purchasing. Since I learned with SignCut, I haven't made the investment in time to learn another program. I guess I had better do so since it won't be long before my license is up.

Again, many thanks to everyone who has assisted. I not only got some cut-ready designs, I learned a lot as well!

[Jay2703 704]

All of the cleanup I did on this was done in SignBlazer Elements.

Jay