Another web site covering an N Gauge model of the depot featured some low resolution images of their model shown against some original drawings. Now modern architect's drawings such as this are usually very accurate and even better can be scaled without losing quality. I found a PDF showing the latest rebuilding of Erstfeld (they have added a long building to the side) which appeared to be an architect's drawing. With so few images of my own I kept searching for suitable images and possible plans to build a better model.Ī couple of days ago I made a couple of interesting discoveries. All in all I was unhappy with it and decided to start again. I also subsequently learnt that I had not included a door that should have been present. The windows were not right and the sides not thick enough. I never finished the model as there where a number of issues with it. The diorama was limited to an A4 footprint so it would fit in a Really Useful 9ltr storage box: I had no drawings available so ended up trying to estimate dimensions from Google Earth images and by posing various model locomotives: Some time ago I started a small diorama featuring the depot in N Gauge. I guess at the time of my visits I had no idea I would want to model it. I have had the pleasure of visiting on two occassions and been fortunate to have been taken behind the scenes to see the collection, but for some reason I have virtually no photographs of the depot itself. It also has the distinction of being one of the homes for the SBB Historic organisation housing a number of preserved locomotives and carriages. Last edit at 04:23AM by NormandC.Erstfeld in the Canton of Uri is a Swiss depot on the Gotthard line. It was so utter cr*p we quickly gave up on it.Įdited 1 time(s). I remember having much trouble with a product aiming for the same purpose one of my former employers bought 15 years ago from Autodesk which was a companion to AutoCAD. For that reason I avoid this format as much as possible.īTW I was really impressed by that Inkscape trace bitmap function, which I tried for the first time. DXF is a closed-source, proprietary and undocumented format after R2000, which is why support on open source software is lacking. The nice thing with FreeCAD is it has good support for SVG now so the DXF conversion from Inkscape is unnecessary. Also if you ever want to have it laser cut in another material (steel, aluminum.) it won't look good. Granted it might not matter for 3D printing but I'm kind of a purist. Inkscape can convert those spline curves to line segments.Įxcept you loose much quality when converting from spline curves to line segments. It may sound tedious but it took me all of 5 minutes tops. When I finally got the whole face cut with all the holes, I extruded it with the Part Extrude tool. For that I used the Draft Downgrade tool, one at a time. Then I had to cut the larger face of the hotrod with all the other faces. To extrude this I needed to convert all the paths to faces using the Draft Upgrade tool. I was left with a series of paths which represent all the closed outlines making the hotrod. I got the large rectangle again and deleted it. So in FreeCAD I opened the SVG and got a series of "path" objects. The DXF was a no-go in FreeCAD because it is made out of spline curves and the DXF importer does not support splines. I use FreeCAD which has a complete GUI my non-programmer brain can understand. I do not use OpenSCAD as my brain is not wired for it. Then I selected the hotod and hit Ctrl+Shift_F to get the Fill and Stroke dialog in the Fill tab, I clicked on "no paint" to get rid of the black filling, then in the Stroke paint tab, I clicked on "Flat color" to show the outline. I got two objects, the filled black hotrod, and a white rectangle (when I hovered over it I could only see the selection rectangle). I right-clicked on it and chose "Ungroup". First I deleted the bitmap image and kept only the generated vector object. But some processing was required afterward. What worked best was Multiple scans/2 passes, in Greys (see capture). In the Trace Bitmap parameters, Brightness cutoff didn't work well, and Edge detection seemed to, but produced a double outline rather than a single one. I saved one jpeg with a filled hotrod, and one with an outline-only hotrod. I just tried with your hotrod image (cool shape by the way!) and it seems to work pretty well.įirst thing is to edit your jpeg first, crop it in your image editor (Gimp, Photoshop.) to keep only one shape, as your jpeg has 5 of them. See the Inkscape wiki page on how to do that: A raster (or bitmap) image such as JPEG cannot simply be imported into Inkscape and exported to DXF, it won't work, as it will still be a raster image. You are aware that DXF is a vector format? Meaning it consists of curves and/or lines.
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