I did another Citizens of Himmelveil conversion tonight. This time, I captured the steps and created a tutorial video.

http://www.cjharker.com/Digital_Cutter_Tutorial.htm
(The tutorial is around 7MB)

I don't know if my method is the best, but I get good results. I'm VERY pleased with my digital cutter!

Nice tutorial - what did you create it in?


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Awesome tut!!! Thanks for sharing that.

What an amazing tool this is for standees...I mean really!

Thanks! I created the tutorial video with Wink, a freeware presentation tool by Debugmode.

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

I started using Wink at work because it was easier for me to capture my steps and annotate them than it was for me to take screenshots and explain what was going on in each one.


I totally agree! Citizens of Himmelveil went from "that set I bought a long time ago and never built" to "OMG! I'm going to fill up my gaming table with these!" And now I've got my eye on Citizens of Himmelveil II...speaking of which, if you need someone to convert that set for you, I know a certain rhino...if only we could get him a copy...

For those of us on the 'remedial side' how'd you get the black silhouette side quickly? Manually outlining is taking some time select this, delete, fill with FG Color...repeat...

I thought about making a silhouette creation tutorial last night, but it was getting late. If I have time, I'll put one together tonight.

In a nutshell, what I do (in Photoshop) is:

1) Delete all unnecessary lines/logos/text/ect from the model page.
2) Flatten the image and crop to only the area I'm interested in.
3) Use the Magic Wand tool with a high tolerance value to select the whitespace around the models.
4) Hold down Shift and click the magic wand tool in the nooks and crannies (like under the arms if arms are resting on hips) to add these areas to the whitespace selection.
5) Click Select => Inverse to select the model instead of the whitespace.
6) Select Edit => Fill to fill the selected area with the foreground color.
7) Select File => Save As => Bitmap.

Probably sounds confusing written out like that - looks like we could use another tutorial...

That is so cool. A nice mix of text and pictures.

Quick tip for the photoshop users -- if you have the 'Layers' panel open, holding down 'control' and clicking on the little picture of the layer in the panel gives you a selection of everything on that layer. My workflow is just getting rid of the whitespace around everthing, changing to a new (empty) layer, control-click on the layer with the bitmaps in it, then do menu Edit -> Fill with the foreground color set to black.

Then I make the new (black) layer active, control-click on the eyeball in the layers panel (which hides all other layers but the clicked one), and do a Save As a BMP for use in autotracing.

Yeah, that's a lot faster than my method of creating silhouettes. I always forget about the little eye that lets you hide a layer. Good tip! I'll try to use that in my next tutorial.

Wow, that's a lot faster!!

Nother thing, I cannot import BMPs from GIMP into Robomaster, but TIFs work just fine.