making curves- need help...

[Carol VanArnam]

Hey guys can anyone help me smooth out the curves on this hammer? I took all I've learned from the forum and got this far. I took the bitmap, traced it, welded, etc. This hammer is for a job I've got with a local contractor. It's his logo. I don't know how to make the curve smooth can anyone tell me how to do that.....

I'll give you a pound of chocolate.... you can have my dog Norman, or I know the 6 winning numbers to the loto I will give you in a sealed envelope.... what a deal. Hmmm I'll tell you who will win the super bowl so you can place a bet. WOW what a deal....

[Dave Fifield]

Hi Carol,

You have a few too many nodes for it to be nice and smooth. I thinned out the number of nodes a lot, then moved a few of them around a bit, then smoothed some of them out and adjusted their vector length. I also added a couple new nodes at the point of the claw of the hammer to make it a bit more pointy rather than round. I think you'll like it. I like chocolate...... :)

The new Corel Draw rev 12 file is here: http://www.woodust.com/hammer_smoothed_ver12.cdr

Cheers,

[Mike Null]

Carol:

Here's another way. I redrew the hammer using rectangles welded together and ovals converted to curves shaped and trimmed against the rectangles. This provides smooth lines an a minimum of nodes. The red one is new.

About 5 minutes. Send the chocolate keep the dog.

[Chris Cordina]

Mike, I tried your method and it was great. two rectangles weld, delete upper left node, put node beginning and end of each curve, change line to curve, pull into shape and done. I would not have thought of doing it that way. It took me longer to type this than do the redraw. I know this isn't my post but you helped me today. Thanks.

[Richard Rumancik]

Seems like the methods above work for this situation.

Below is a link to a short CorelDraw tutorial that shows how you can manually re-construct a logo or graphic. The input could be a bitmap or "bad" vector artwork. Sometimes this is easier than using the trace function and having to deal with too many nodes and doing a lot of editing. This method might be useful to some members.

Basically you import your starting graphic into CorelDraw (you could put this on a locked layer). On another layer use the Bezier tool to trace around the shape with straight lines (ignoring curves for the moment.) Then you go back and convert the straight lines on the corners into curves. (Right click on a node, then click "to curve". This will make the adjacent ccw segment into a curve with handles.) You can then pull on the handles in order to massage the straight "curves" into a rounded shape that matches the graphic you are copying. You could also weld in separate rectangles or circles if this was easier in some places.

Here's the full explanation. If there is a shape with a "hole" in it (eg. letter A) I would probably use the Combine function instead of the "trim" function, to make it into an object that could be filled.


graphicssoft.about.com/od/coreldraw/l/bltracelogo.htm

[Mitchell Andrus]

Fixed link:

www.graphicssoft.about.com/od/coreldraw/l/bltracelogo.htm (http://www.graphicssoft.about.com/od/coreldraw/l/bltracelogo.htm)

[Richard Rumancik]

Thanks for fixing the link . . . but I'm confused about how links are presented in the program we are using for the forum.

When you go to the link you posted, it drops off the www part. So if you manually type in the URL I supplied, it works. The program we are using here on the forum made my text LOOK like an active link in preview mode, but did not actually make it into a real link.

I was trying to prevent a different problem that happened in another post. It seems that long URLs are truncated in the text display. This is indicated by three dots somewhere in the middle of the URL. Like this

(snipped here)oberonplace.com/forums/ar...php/t-962.html (http://www.oberonplace.com/forums/ar...php/t-962.html)

When you click on a link posted like this, it will go to the correct place. However, if someone prints out the post, they might not be able to find the page manually; or if they cut and paste it into another location or message, the URL becomes dead.

I was trying to avoid the three-dot problem and created another problem.

Keith: can anything be done to prevent the "abbreviated" URLs with the 3 dots?

[Carol VanArnam]

You guys are GREAT. I'm cooking dinner for all of you.... Thanks for the tips I'll read all of them and try your trick. A month ago I couldn't have gotten this far but now with your tips I'm "almost a professional" (ha ha)

There is a lumber yard in my state that has 3 stores. I made them some little saw blades the other day with their business info (a mini business card kind of thing) just as a free gift to them. Cost me $1.25 in wood to make 80 little saws. The owner loved them so much he gave me $51 in merchandise I needed for FREE. He said if I could make a hammer he'd be buying them from me for sure. I call this fishing for dollars.... The guy didn't even know he needed what I was selling.

OK chocolate for all of you folks!!

[Dave Fifield]

Richard,

Try posting your links using text input UBB code like this {url=http://www.sawmillcreek.org}http : // www(.)sawmillcreek(.)org or whatever you want to type in here{/url}, but using the square brackets [] around the url bits and typing the URL in the middle correctly instead (I used the curly brackets and messed up the URL deliberately so I could demonstrate the UBB code use). The text in the middle can be anything you like. I usually make it a shorter description, but you might like to make it the full URL without the 3 dots.

So, to the thread viewer it works like this http://www.sawmillcreek.org or whatever you want to type in here (http://www.sawmillcreek.org).

Hope this helps.