1 Photoshop doesn't do this; Illustrator does. Not that that helps your budget. Stanford has a free online vectorizing service, which is useful for small-volume stuff. I don't know how good Microsoft's Expression Design is, but it has a free trial, and unlike the Adobe suite, it's dirt cheap for me ($60).

-j

2 If Adobe Illustrator does it- I'd suggest trying InkScape
I've found it to be a great free replacement for Illustrator in practically every respect.

3

I knew about that Stanford thing, but it's not really a very good alternative if you want to transform about 200 images, since each one has to be uploaded and then downloaded manually. That's assuming they don't have a troublemaker cap, too.

I'll look at Inkscape. I already have a link for it.

4

Well, Inkscape is more impressive than I thought it would be. You can load your image in and fire up a special Vectorize frame, and if the image is conducive (and rendered frames are nearly ideal) and you set your parameters right, the result is fast and clean.

Of course, like nearly all open source packages, it feels a bit unpolished. Hit the "help" button, and it fires up your browser to access an online manual stored on a server in France.

I haven't looked yet to see if it can do batch processing. If not, it's not going to be as nice, but it will still be a lot better than the approach I used before.

It just occurred to me that I didn't check to see if it could save vector images in a format that Flash can load.

5

The good news: Inkscape can write EMF files, and Flash can read them in.

The strange news: it creates a separate plane for each color threshold. That works in Flash, but it's a bit strange.

The bad news: I don't see any way to do batch processing. Sob.

The worst news: Inkscape isn't consistent about where it places imported bitmaps on its workbench, but the emf file it produces contains the origin offset, so I have to manually place all the images so they line up.

It'll work. But it means doing something like 20 manual operations per frame to do the conversion. (The vectorize control frame doesn't remember its settings, so I have to manually enter them all every time.)

It's about what I expect from Open Source: it works, but it doesn't work well.

It's worth what I paid for it, that's for certain.

6

It's not just that it's inconsistent about where it places imported bitmaps. They're deliberately randomizing it. I suppose the idea is that if you import several at once, it doesn't lay them all on top of one another -- but I don't want to do that.

Randomizing the positions would be fine, were it not for the fact that the randomized position ends up in the resulting EMF file.

7

Flix can vectorize to flv or swf.  http://www.on2.com  and you can download a demo version of Flix Pro  It also does batch files. A little pricey for the pro version, though.  Dunno how good that function is, though, since I haven't tried it.

8 Vectorizing to SWF would be fine, because I have tools that can take SWFs apart. I'll take a look at it.

9 I can't figure out how to get it to process a BMP file. I can specify it as the input, and designate a vectorized SWF file as the output, but the image doesn't end up in the timeline, and when I create output it's only about 120 bytes and displays just a big "X" across the screen. (Their indication that it was produced with the demo version.)

10

I have Adobe CS3 on my laptop, and only the Flix Pro demo installed, and I'm not at home at the moment.  I made a single bmp image, and exported it from the Flix Pro demo as swf.  I could successfully import it into Dreamweaver and preview shows the original (photo) image with the "x."  Nothing vectorized, and that's strange.  But Flash CS3 shows only the "x" as you described.

The timeline may be the problem; there doesn't appear to be any way to specify duration in Flix for a still image.  Sorry; I didn't think about that when I recommended it; only thought about its vector ability and batching.

11 There must be some way to do it, or else there would be no reason why the program would permit you to import still images.

1 Hah, I see all those girls have what one of Heinlein's characters termed a profound interest in recreational sex.

2

Darned if I know how you came to that conclusion.

"It's only a model."

3

When I was googling around a couple of days ago I ran into mention elsewhere that yet another free figure, named "Aiko 3", could be downloaded free from here. But that link times out for me. The parent URL does, too. I am not sure if that's a temporary condition, or if DAZ went OOB. The reference was something like three years old, so they could have died since then.

It's entirely possible that someone out there is mirroring the download file, but if they are I probably won't ever find it. Googling for "Poser Aiko" brings up 97000 hits, virtually all of which are about modifications to the basic figure that require you to already have it. Alas; she's pretty cute, and I'd like to find it somewhere.

4 The link works fine for me, so probably they had an outage and no-one was around to notice.

The base Aiko model doesn't look that great, but some of the variants and add-on packs are pretty interesting. Which is why they give the base model away for free, I guess - they have 32 not for free add-ons.  

5

Well, that's interesting, because I still can't reach it. However, that other download is complete and I'm going to unpack it now.

I wonder if I'm blocked by a firewall or something? I should have tried it through Anonymouse.

6

And I can see it through Anonymouse. I wonder what the deal is?

(Maybe I blocked it in my own firewall; it's happened before.)

7

The base Aiko model doesn't look that great...

Boy, you're right about that. She isn't very impressive at all. But there are a bunch of makeovers and upgrades available as free downloads on Renderosity and ShareCG which require you to have Aiko 3, so it's still worth having.

8 Steven, I was referring to the shaved crotches.  It was kind of a joke.

9

Oh, that.

Back to my connection problems, it was indeed my fault. I did have a firewall rule. It's gone now, and I can reach the site. (I'm an idiot sometimes.) (Sometimes? Shaddup...)

10

Boy, you're right about that. She isn't very impressive at all. But there are a bunch of makeovers and upgrades available as free downloads on Renderosity and ShareCG which require you to have Aiko 3, so it's still worth having.

And with the paid add-ons (which aren't that expensive individually) you can end up with results like this:


Not feature-film quality, but not bad either.

They also have some free software, so I've just downloaded that.

11

If you're starting to get into this, then here are a couple of links to big sites with large collections of free stuff:

Renderosity
ShareCG

You do have to join Renderosity, but it doesn't cost anything.