I would like to be able to use a certain kind of broken line to represent vegetation on a plane. I could simply trace over an imported image, but that’s hard to do with a mouse. I don’t actually need the line to be vectorised (though I don’t rule that out). I could simply use the image and scale it, join several sections together, crop, etc.
I drew a line with a pen and scanned it high res to a PNG file (Dropbox - img20200513_09191406.png - Simplify your life). But that creates an image box much larger than needed. Is there a way to get rid of the background and just leave the line? Or maybe there is just a much better way of producing a line that looks hand drawn like this?
Simplest way I know of is to crop the image and remove the background using an image editor. I used Paint.net for these ones, but it’s not available for MAC. Any half decent editor would probably do it though.
For this on I cropped the image and removed the background: (you can download it)
I can’t see a transparent (ok, I know, how could I see transparency) background around the curved line in your image. Isn’t that an issue in using such a curve over / on top of created geometry?
Sorry @simoncbevans, my reply was ment for @IanT, my bad.
His results show no transparency around the curved line, which I would think is what you are looking for.
@simoncbevans, if you don’t mind the white background, can’t you just explode your image to obtain texture and then cut off the empty white area. Even exportin that again in SketchUp would give you something similar to @IanT’s result.
With use of the ‘Freehand’ tool in SketchUp and exporting without background I get:
The middle one is drawn as a curve with the ‘Freehand’ tool. The first one is a filled in offset of the middle one.
The first one is done like the middle one but then later with offset to obtain a narrow face.
The last one is a 3D-Poliline (‘Freehand’ tool while holding down [Shift]).
You can use any 2D graphics program - Inkscape, Corel Draw, Illustrator, etc…, even 3D one, and after drawing the vector line you can export it as a PNG file, DXF/DWG file, PDF file (vectorial).
