Just for fun

**Egg Bramhill** · 30 January 2008, 02:09 PM

Just for fun, can anyone guess what this is? I leave it for a while before revealing the answer.

**David O'Neil** · 30 January 2008, 02:44 PM

It's a car that drove over a land mine. (Remote controlled, of course--wouldn't want anyone to get hurt.)

**iamtheblues** · 30 January 2008, 03:15 PM

It's either the front of a messy eater's shirt
or the winner of The Turner Prize. (or both!)
Saludos,
Bob.

**Soquili** · 30 January 2008, 03:57 PM

Some type of heavy equipment that runs on metal treads. Maybe a bulldozer.

**pauland** · 30 January 2008, 04:22 PM

Car transporter.

**Egg Bramhill** · 30 January 2008, 05:49 PM

Hi everybody, Bill was almost spot on. I just took a photo into Vector Magic an vectorised it. I was impressed so I thought I run it through Flash. The final image is the original photo but the rest is all vector.

There's over 200 shapes to tween so it's not the type of thing you could easily do in XXP.

**Egg Bramhill** · 30 January 2008, 05:59 PM

Here's the vector Vector Magic created.

**pauland** · 30 January 2008, 06:15 PM

Egg,

Did you explode it by hand (to position the elements in the first frame) or do you have some nifty script?

Paul

**David O'Neil** · 30 January 2008, 10:48 PM

For comparison, here's the output of Xara's bitmap tracer. 9,774 shapes. The seat area and tracks are noticeably more accurate in the Xara version, but there is some weird artifact between the tracks. (10 passes used, ...) The Xara file is 364 KB.

**Egg Bramhill** · 31 January 2008, 01:11 AM

Paul,

There was just over 200 pieces in the Vector. In Flash I did a "Distrubute to Layers" which places every object on it's own layer (which it has to be if you require a tween, then I just moved each shape off screen. It was a bit boring but quite quick. Just dealing with 200+ layers is a PIA.

David,

I have to agree that XXP does a far "better" vector trace than any other program of experienced on photographic images. However 10,000 shapes can't really be manipulated and the resultant vector file is far larger than the original bitmap. Even with 200 from Vector Magic the file size was twice the original jpg size. So unless you want to create an image at a very large size and want it vector, I believe there's no real practicle use for XXP's bitmap tracer.