[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Have to laugh a bit. Though I was successful as above, it wasn’t clear afterwards exactly what I had done to make it work. There was a bit of random scrambling with buttons.

My steps were:
1. Build in PS, save a jpeg.
2. Import into Ai.
3. Click on image followed by Window> Image Trace (B&W logo option)
4. Object> Expand
5. Object> Ungroup
6. Select> Object> Point Type Object
7. Seems I needed to first left click twice followed by once on object spaces to be deleted, then delete.
8. Adding the incantation: “Klaatu Barada Nikto” seemed to help.
9. Save as .svg file
10. Import into Tinkercad.

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

I live at the base of a ski mountain where I have a season’s pass. As a result, I usually never ski anywhere it’s going to cost me. It’s that mentality – and shear marketing genius – that now powers Adobe Creative Cloud.

Now let me go all fan-boy for a minute. CC is a new, glorious experience for me whereby my software is constantly up-to-date and tech help is always a phone call away. All for less than the cost of soft drinks for a video shoot. Then again, who needs soft drinks when I have drunk the Kool-aide.

RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Omg, Vince. The dang thing worked…

I have to fess up and tell you that for the uninitiated such as myself, your instructions seemed a bit like Greek. So I started going through them literally with step-by-step deciphering and experimentation, commenting as I went, fighting to keep my sarcasm under control, because when you click on some of these buttons, there is no obvious immediate action – it’s not clear you are having any effect. But the breakthrough was exactly as you indicated: understanding that the totality consists of sub parts – objects, including the white parts, that can be separated out and isolated utilizing buttons in “object” then “select.” And key: you then can and should actually delete the white parts. (Why I should be made to do that is fodder for my rant below.) So I am beholden, for I’ve probably spent a week or two here and there trying to figure this thing out. And like most things, it’s easy when you know how.

And now even as thankful as I am, I’m going to leave my little rant below actually written before my attempt above and directed at software developers.

Cheers,
Rob

rant. You know, I’m sure for folks who are familiar with Ai, this is all old hat and Adobe must be very proud of their Ai accomplishment… like Rube Goldberg was very proud of his. Someday, software developers will realize that most of us have lives and are not enamoured with the beauty of their complexity. We just want it to work. And intuitively. (“Expert systems” comes to mind.) Apple is beginning to figure this one out to their great success. I just want to click on my silly little object and have a vector file ready for Tinkercad, because, you know, I’m told Tickercad is sooo easy. (A bit of irony there.) Maybe someday I’ll be able to find out. Adobe has saddled me with umpteen new programs I didn’t ask for. They better now make them work for me. The world is filled with thousand, millions, of programs. No one has time for a thousand page instruction manual any more. Only intuition. So until that point, we remain in the software Dark Ages. /rant

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Further to above, I have a diligent Autodesk product manager attempting to help me, so far with partial success. Partial in so far as he tells me:
“There were a lot of overlapping vectors in the SVG. I can still do some more clean up, but it is looking quite good from my side..” (And it does in his Tinkercad screen-save to me.)

He goes on, “The way svg works is the following: when imported into Tinkercad, it tries to find boundaries and extrude them. If it finds islands within the boundaries, it will not extrude them. If there are several boundaries nested, it will extrude every other one. With the amount of overlapping vectors in your file, it was impossible to detect boundaries correctly. Once I removed the overlaps, the file started to work.”

Let me restate that the original artwork is very simple: a symbol within two concentric circles.

But what is causing my problems and what is he doing to “clean up” the vectors?

Says my helper: “I was also surprised that there was no clarity in Illustrator around overlaps.”

On a hunch, first I pulled out every trick to be found online to get rid of anti-aliasing in my image in case this was the root of my wayward multiple vectors, ending up with a solid artwork with a single mostly black pixel border around the image. Didn’t do anything to help. (Also, my background is transparent.)

So left with trying to understand how he is “cleaning up” my image. Of course to me, all I see is a single lovely vector line in Illustrator. How is he seeing multiple vectors?

“I normally first ungroup the vectors, and then start deleting and see if there’s something below. There must be a better way, but mine works.”

My last communication concerns me trying to understand his clean up procedure.
How do you “ungroup” the vectors? Once ungrouped, how does one delete and see what’s below? He is deleting redundant closed vectors (I presume). Of course the final vector diagram must have some closed vectors to extrude properly in Tinkercad.

So if anyone has some insight after the above, please do tell. Especially with regards to how to clean up multiple vectors.

Cheers,
RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Your Tinkercad experience is reassuring. My gut tells me I must be doing some simple procedure wrong. But what?

I don’t know Illustrator but still I thought I was doing things correctly. I checked a few of the closed shapes on full magnification and they seem perfectly closed, yet maybe half of the trace (without any filled in walls)shows up in Tinkercad. When I export to .svg via “save as”, the default svg is checked, not Adobe CEF.

I note that when I simply trace over lines using pen function, those pen marks transfer just fine to Tinkercad and they extrude.

Here is precisely the steps I have been taking and the results I get:

1. In Ai: Open new file: 11×8.5 in. 300 pixels/in. (wonder if tinkercad has maximum, will test smaller)
2. From Photoshop, paste b&w logo graphic, it fills space
3. In Image Trace Panel, Preset = Black & White Logo
“Image Large” warning, may take time: continue with “ok”
4. executes and shows: Threshold = 128, paths 15, anchors = 1842
5. View: Outlines, shows very thin and perfect outline of my logo artwork
6. Check one closed structure on full mag, no gaps
7. Put view back to “tracing Result”
8. File, save copy as, save as type svg(*svg), save
using type=svg, not Adobe CEF
9. Over to Tinkercad
10. Log in
11. Create new design
12. import, file (test.svg)
13. Import
see usual result: a third to half the outlines partially present, no walled structures.

Thanks,
RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

A lads-and-I-in-Burma story:

In the time of dinosaurs when 3/4″ news cameras were two parts requiring an assistant to pack along the umbilicalled recorder, my TV station had a policy of sending editors out into the world for a one month bit of familiarization.

As I understand it, the cameraman instinctively leapt up, eye to eye-piece, running towards his appearing subject while I was sitting on the floor looking for that on-switch.

I believe this incident, more than anything, led to the development of the single-unit camcorder and editors banned from the field.

RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Interesting, Pr CC seems to be a .52 GB smaller install than CS6, unless running Pr CS6 somehow inflated it.

RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

[Nevin Styre] “1. CC apps are not installed over CS6 apps, CS6 remains on your disk and is still usable.”

Brother. Who needs the additional complication?

So then I should ask:

I suppose these old CS6 apps need to be uninstalled.

Is it too much to hope the new Pr CC program nicely takes over all the existing Pr CS6 files?

What might be the procedure to ensure a slick, easy transfer of Pr6 files and locations to CC?

RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

Oh, I hope that’s not the way it works.

Over the last few years, I have collected a “ton” of .mts files copied across from SD cards to hard drive folders with the intention of editing in PrP some day. There’s a work-around?

RBG

[Rob Brandreth-gibbs]

You have to admit it’s a pretty audacious thing for Apple to just ignore our client’s needs and mandatory requirements in Apple’s pursuit of what they believe we must use.

RBG

Rob Brandreth-Gibbs
Bravo Zulu Productions
Vancouver, Canada