How To Transform an Image into Lines For AutoCAD Using Illustrator

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 7, 2021
2 replies
7170 views

I have created a sillouette illustration comprised of some bears and trees that I want to send to my laser and cut out the sillouette on a sheet of aluminum. I always end up with excess or non-existing lines in the artwork and the laser software will not accept the file.

The path I have taken is to create the sillouette, save as a tiff (hoping to remove any extra lines and points), re-open in Illustrator, Image Trace as a B & W Logo and export as an Autocad DWG file where engineering cleans it up a bit. However, the laser software sees the image as incomplete, missing lines and details.

I have tries various options with varying results...none accptable.

It seems to me that this is a relatively simple line drawing and should not be this much trouble to achieve.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

JE

Bear_Sign.pdf

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Correct answer Omar.Fathy

As @Doug A Roberts said, you see that it is a simple artwork, but if you select it or press Ctrl+Y you can see more unnecessary lines and shapes. Youcan select all and from Window>Pathfinder Press on Unite icon to merge it in one shape.
If

Omar.Fathy

Correct answer

Community Expert

As @Doug A Roberts said, you see that it is a simple artwork, but if you select it or press Ctrl+Y you can see more unnecessary lines and shapes. Youcan select all and from Window>Pathfinder Press on Unite icon to merge it in one shape.
If

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

Is this what you want to end up with?
Bear sign

It is a relatively simple drawing, but it seems to have been created in a confusing way. There are unnecessary compound shapes, hidden layers etc. that need to be removed.

E

easleyj41168339Author

Participant

Thanx Doug...

First of all...let me start by saying I'm no graphic artist. I manage a computer mfg. company and I use Illustrator to create PDF's for our silkscreening operation, so my knowledge of Illustrator is limited at best.

The PDF I end up with looks just like yours. If there are hidden layers and artifacts in the file I am not aware of them nor would I know how to eliminate them in a timely fashion. I figured that if I converted to an image, such as a TIFF or JPG, it would eliminated any hidden items and by using Image Trace would give a single line or path around the entire silouette. Not so?

JE

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

In Illustrator, with the hidden layers shown and everything selected, your file looks like this:

The text is a compound shape; this should be released and converted to a compound path. The log has a no stroke/fill path around it which should be deleted; the hidden layers can simply be removed. There is no need to export a TIFF and use image trace -- fix these problems and then combine shapes with Pathfinder and you have a single silhouette shape.

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