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Sketch picture for perf pattern

I'd like to make a sheet metal panel with a profile of Duke Ellington. This panel will be around 18 x 20 inches and Duke's profile will be shown with perforated holes of various sizes, punched on a turret press. We'll show this part to our customer as a sample. Eventually we'll make others, about 4 x 8 feet in size with other famous dead people such as Einstein, Washington, Lincoln, and perhaps some that are living. The end of this is putting these in a school as an inspiration to the students and a barrier around a playground.

So far I've inserted a sketch picture of Duke in my part, and then on separate sketches drawn around the picture and used the fill pattern for the perf hole locations. I plan to vary the hole and pattern sizes to get some shading.

Have any of you done this type of thing? Any suggestions for me?

Thanks for any comments or suggestions. Diego

Reply to
Diego
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Cool idea! Don't they call the varying dot sizes "halftone" when they use it for printing? There must be programs that generate the halftone pattern from a given image for a particular size output. Seems like you could trick such a program into giving you the "correct" pattern of dots. Then you are stuck with the fun part of figuring out how to generate a sketch from the dot pattern.

You're liable to end up with an enormous number of holes. I hope you've got a fast machine and a lot of memory!

Jerry Steiger

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

Thanks Jerry. You helped point me in a helpful direction. I'll let you know how this works out.

I checked with my daughter, a graphics designer and she responded:

I like the line about "with other famous dead people." :) I guess I would need to see what the images look like to start with. Making it into a dot pattern can be done in either Photoshop or Illustrator. I turned an object into a dot pattern for one of my projects for my Illustrator class, but would need to see the image to see if it could be done from that.

regards, Diego

Reply to
Diego

Diego,

Sounds like you're on the right track. Use the Pattern>Area Fill feature which will allow you to fill an area with a predefined punch shape or you're own "seed" feature and control it's perimeter with a sketch or face boundary. If you have good black and white silhouette picture of your profiles, you can use 2008's trace picture add-in (which is know part of Sketch Picture) which will automatically create a sketch of the profile.

Regards

Mark

Reply to
mbiasotti

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