Help needed "vectorizing" an image

[Skruffy]

I admit that I am a complete ignoramus when it comes to image editing software. As Arthur C. Clarke said famously "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, Photoshop might as well be magic to me! :lol

What I'm trying to accomplish is to create a Pimp-Boy 3 Billion from the game Fallout: New Vegas. I plan to take one of my existing Pip-Boy 3000 casts and use it as a base. Below is a screen shot I took from the game at the highest resolution I could of what I need. The resolution is still pretty crummy and the edges are jagged.

What I need is an image that I can send to someone with a laser cutter so they can cut out the letters (which will be tiny) that I can affix to my resin cast. I was told converting this image to a vector was the way to go. I've tried printing this out and manually cutting the letters out, but they are too small to work with. At the size I need for the prop, they are 3 - 3.5 mm tall.

I've googled, I've read some things that don't make much sense to me, and I've even tried a few online converters that seem to just make a blurry mess out of the thing with no good crisp-ness of detail.

I'm hoping someone out there who knows far more than I do about this subject is willing to lend a hand? Pretty please?

 

[FXengineer]

I took a crack at it. Its pretty rough. Have you tried doing a search on the companies web site for a better picture? If you could just figure out the font or a close match. I checked all mine, but I don't have the most extensive library.

 

[Hypercats]

Have you tried "live trace" in Illustrator yet? Unfortunately that image is pretty small and blurry, but if you've got illustrator, you can probably find a font that matches it enough to type over that images, convert to outlines, and then tweak to fit the desired typeface. I can tell you this though: it's going to be a hell of a lot easier than what I went through to get something that resembled the "pip - boy" typeface.

 

[FXengineer]

Have you tried "live trace" in Illustrator yet? Unfortunately that image is pretty small and blurry, but if you've got illustrator, you can probably find a font that matches it enough to type over that images, convert to outlines, and then tweak to fit the desired typeface. I can tell you this though: it's going to be a hell of a lot easier than what I went through to get something that resembled the "pip - boy" typeface.

I wanted to help a brother out and that is EXACTLY what I did. Spent quite some time and in the end it was ugly and would take a lot more time to make it look pretty. No font matches close. I know there are a lot of free and pay fonts out there. He'll just need to do some research.

 

[Skruffy]

Hypercats, thank you for the idea, and FX, thank you for the attempted execution of that idea! You guys rock! :cheers

I'm sorry to hear it wasn't met with much success, though. I don't have illustrator, but I did download some free software called Inkscape which can convert a bitmap to a vector. It didn't work well on the first few tries, so I've tried doing similar to what I think live trace does - I used MS paint to outline each letter, pixel by pixel. I did the first few and then tried converting that to vector and then using the "find edges" tool. It worked better, but the end result still has lost too much detail to be usable.

I've done some looking around on the interwebs for the proper font, but didn't have much success. But that search wasn't exhaustive, so I'll revisit that. Heck, I may just play with what I have in Word and see if I can come up with a close-enough result.

 

[Superkrates]

Not sure about the '3' - I think it's just jumbled interpolation of the pixels at such low resolution that makes it look like an '8' on the original - but, here's my shot at redrawing it (letter height is 12 and 3.25mm).
No problem if you want changes.

 

[Hypercats]

I wanted to help a brother out and that is EXACTLY what I did. Spent quite some time and in the end it was ugly and would take a lot more time to make it look pretty. No font matches close. I know there are a lot of free and pay fonts out there. He'll just need to do some research.

I suppose it helps that I have 1200 fonts on my computer and a good font browser. Here's some that are close and free:
Action Force
Achery
Flyboy

Here's 20 minutes of work with Flyboy. It would need to be tweaked a bit still, but 80% of the geometry is there and pretty close:

The font is here if anyone else wants to take a crack at it:
Flyboy BB Font @ 1001Fonts.com

 

[atincan]

i know this is late... but an easier way to vector an image is to use a high res image... It makes the job much more easier to take a closer look at each pixels when an image is at least 300 dpi, then shrink it down to the desired size after that.

thats if you want the text down accurately... if not, Hypercats job works just as well

 

[ARKM]

One thing that may help is to convert your image to black and white and then remove all areas of gray. Of course you will need to be familiar with image editing to do this. I have been told by a local laser engraving company to do this to any images that I want THEM to vectorize. For them, the image has to be solid black and solid white, nothing else. Anywho, doing this may help with Inkscape conversions.

 

[Wicked]

That image is too small to vector properly. The best thing you could do would be to join the forums at Fallout 3 Nexus - Fallout 3 mods and community, go to the modding boards, and request somebody post a .png file version of the high resolution texture. Once you explain what it is you're looking to do I'm sure somebody would be willing to do it for you in exchange for you just posting pics when you're done. Once you have the high res texture you can post it here and one of us can vector it for you. I'd be willing to do the vector in my spare time, but I would need a proper picture to work from as I don't have a Wacom pad or anything and I have to do it all by mouse and keyboard. Then again all I have access to is Inkscape so you'd probably be better off with somebody who has Illustrator if you can find it.

 

[DXM]

This site might help
VECTOR MAGIC