Wonderful Michael,

that's what I call a clean output. Here's a more common 3:1 ratio between silhouettes and default lines. I've noticed you used a 10:1 ratio.

3:1 I love it

Here's the one for Martin Spencer-Ford:
Looks also very good.

The last one I promise (I can't help but I'm too excited :)

Reduced background opacity and 75% black silhouette:

Just opinions:
With regard to printed output, with a 5 year old Brother MFC laser printer, Michael's test_silhouette.pdf is superb,
(although it looks a little too "harsh" or "sharp" on my samsung monitor, in my opinion.) I gather it is "10X?

I think the "3X" 3x silhouettes.png of Martin look good (better) on the monitor, but the printout is not so good, the lines are printed
jagged. One of the vertical lines is partly light blue on the monitor, for the latter two png of Martin.

- Brian

Edit: I see that Michael's pdf had about ten times the resolution...

I'm liking it!



...a little PS filtering to give it a 'hand-drawn' appeal.

Hi Michael

This looks brilliant! I guess the only thing missing is curve optimisation ie ellipses have 4 points only but as you say and I have read in other places, it took isodraw a lot of development time to achieve this.

Well done, i look forward to the new release :--)

matt

>I see that Michael's pdf had about ten times the resolution...

Brian, you noticed that already my attachments are just quick low resolution screenshots of the illustrator work space.

>..a little PS filtering to give it a 'hand-drawn' appeal

Very nice Mike. All those possibilities are great. What filters did you use?
I don't think I'll use C4Ds Sketch&Toon that much when V3 is finished. MoIs output is better.
I'm also looking forward to play with MoIs ligthing options.

Is there, or would it be beneficial, to have an on screen "print preview" of how the pdf would look in
a printed version? Laserjet? Inkjet?
Or is the target another software program?

I'll have to try that photoshop filtering.

What is the type of output? Bitmaps?
I noticed that the free "AI Viewer" program does not show anything.

- Brian

That is such a sexy result!

That is what I needed from Solid Works for 11 years for product manuals and manufacturing instruction guides.

That turns finish work in an outside package in just laying out the images in the right places.


Simply awesome.

Well, I use the make 2d to do architectural drawings from the model and usually I don't model every detail because it is too time and power consuming and I just add it later in 2d. Furthermore if I want to change some lines styles of a make 2d output it is easier if the lines preserves the object name so I can isolate a group of lines and change just the lines I want. I attached an example.

Hi Martin,

> Here's a more common 3:1 ratio between silhouettes and default lines. I've noticed you used a 10:1 ratio.

What is the line weight that you used for the small size there?

In the settings I used, I was kind of tuning things so the silhouettes were easier to distinguish in Adobe Reader when still zoomed a bit out. But it seems like Adobe Reader may kind of fatten things up a bit on the on-screen display though, it looks fairly different than the same weights being displayed inside of Illustrator.

I am planning on having these line weights be settable in export options though, so you'll be able to set them to whatever you like.

- Michael

Hi Martin,

> The last one I promise (I can't help but I'm too excited :)
>
> Reduced background opacity and 75% black silhouette:


This is why it's so cool to have separate layers and having vectors for the lines, there is a lot of possibility to do various tuning and tweaking to get different looks!

- Michael

Hi Brian,

> With regard to printed output, with a 5 year old Brother MFC laser printer, Michael's test_silhouette.pdf is superb,
> (although it looks a little too "harsh" or "sharp" on my samsung monitor, in my opinion.) I gather it is "10X?

Yeah it seems to be fairly hard to really clearly see small differences in line weight on the monitor, the printer just has such a finer grained resolution than the monitor.

So probably there won't be any one single "one size fits all purposes" line weights, different kinds of uses will probably benefit from different settings.

Over here just the screen display between Adobe Reader and Adobe Illustrator with the same line weights actually looks fairly different...

- Michael

Hi Brian,

> Is there, or would it be beneficial, to have an on screen "print preview" of how the pdf would look in
> a printed version? Laserjet? Inkjet?

It would definitely be nice to have that, but I have to balance that against how much development time it would take and also how much actual real life usefulness that it would provide.

Also for things like line weights for printing you really can't entirely judge 100% what the print will look like from the on screen display, I think you have to actually make some printouts to really see it.

So I thinking that probably an on screen preview of the hidden lines probably won't happen for this release.



> Or is the target another software program?

Yeah, pretty much - if you just want to do a print then the other program can be the Adobe Reader PDF viewer program. If you want to adjust things then the other program would be a 2D illustration program like Adobe Illustrator / Corel Draw / Xara / Inkscape / etc...

- Michael

Hi ed,

> <....>
> Furthermore if I want to change some lines styles of a make 2d output

Right now this kind of thing with changing line styles for individual objects won't really work in MoI since MoI doesn't have settable line styles yet for the regular modeling area.

But that does help me understand what you'd want that for - you kind of rough out the shape in 3D and then convert that to a 2D drawing and then continue working on your drawing just as if you were in a 2D CAD program doing 2D drawing only after that, is that basically correct?

If you wanted to do that in MoI you could just save out to any of .ai /.pdf /.dxf format and then just open that file back into MoI and then do 2D drawing on top of it.

- Michael

Dang!
Rather excellent!


This might go well with two tone lightning like Mike's example




Tweaking colors or vectorise the bitmap would be easy afterward.




Ikea plans on the fly!!!







Jolly good!

Marc

> What filters did you use?

Martin, the fill layer was processed using one of PS's built-in "Artistic" filters. This gives the fill a painted look.
The outlines were Gaussian blurred a little and then contrast was applied to re-sharpen the result.
I used an Eye-Candy "Jiggle" filter to give it all a non-computer-made 'hand' look. You can also use PS's stock "Distort/Ripple" filter on a low setting.


Michael, will this type of outlining output work in Perspective, Parallel and Iso modes?

"... you kind of rough out the shape in 3D and then convert that to a 2D drawing and then continue working on your drawing..."

Yes! ok, I think I can live importing back the pdf. Only one question, I don't understand yet if the pdf will preserve both the objects name and styles.