Didn't know about autotrace. I was supposing it would just trace the bitmap into a compound path, sort of what like potrace does, but the animation suggests it traces into a single path - which is absolutely great, as afterwards you can adjust the stroke width, linecaps and more thingies. Amazing!
Yeah potrace can do the same thing - trace a path of a bitmap. (Imagemagick can too). In my tests (with lots of line drawings) I felt autotrace generally had better results. Wish I kept the side-by-side comparisons to show...
I'm wondering if this could be used to generate drawings using line weight by using a brush tip and adjusting the Z coordinates.
The "dessins abrégés" (abridged drawings) are a great historical antecedant by master artist Keisai would be a perfect match for this.
That's a great idea! I think you're absolutely right - in the video of the plotter I used a pen that has a more flexible nib and pressing it down (especially at an angle) will add more line weight. I'll have to encode the line width along the line now :)
There is a Posca with a brush tip and good ink flow.
The easiest to find is the Pentel, but does not flow that fast so you'd have to adjust the speed. So it might not be that easy, and require some experimentation...
Cool project, nice work. FWIW, Inkscape has an extension called "Gcodetools" which can turn SVG paths into Gcode for you. But I totally get the desire to do it for yourself.
That one reminded me about inkscape and the path simplify feature (not specific to one line drawings, but that was a loose association seeing the animated drawings)
