Creating geometry from image

Support Modeling
1

I wish to create a plane to the shape of an image, kind of like using a mask in Photoshop to change the shape of a layer, or also like a stencil. Eg, using this tree

dT88nrGTe.jpeg900×1238 107 KB

to make a plane that is that shape, geometry where the image it’s black, none where it is white (or from the alpha channel)

Any ideas?

Thanks

2

  • download Inkscape
    http://www.inkscape.org

  • launch Inkscape, in the top menu click on File -> Import , select your picture and load it

  • Confirm “Embed”

  • In the top menu, click on Object -> Align and Distribute

  • Click on both Align buttons to center the imported selection
    http://i.imgur.com/pBgjuJ7.jpg

  • in the top menu, click on Path -> Trace Bitmap

  • in the popup panel that appears, enable “Remove Background” then click OK, close that popup panel now

  • click on File -> Save As and save that .svg file

  • Load Blender 2.70a (it will not work on a buildbot version as the svg import is currently broken, bug having been reported)

  • Click on File -> Import -> Import -> Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

  • Load your newly created SVG file and you should obtain
    http://i.imgur.com/Q5M0Jtd.jpg

note : the imported object will be very small, so don’t hesitate to scale it up, and it’s a Curve object, so if you need it as a Mesh , you’ll just have to press (in Object Mode) ALT+C -> Mesh from Curve
(or in the bottom menu Object -> Convert -> Mesh from Curve)

IF converted to Mesh, you may have to apply scale (CTRL+A -> Rotation&Scale) in Object mode and remove double in edit mode

3

You don’t need inkscape, you can do it with blender, go here… http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-svg and convert your image to a scalable vector graphic (.svg file), then in blender go into user perferences and enable .SVG import, then you can simply import the SVG file directly into blender.

4

inkscape is handy to have, nonetheless. basically an open source replacement for illustrator.