Xara wizardry to create transparency?

[Lexje]

Hi folks,

Not specifically Xara related, but I need to create a copy of a ground plan in such a way that only the 'lines' are copied, meaning the 'remainder' of the (white) sheet becomes transparent.

Purpose is to import it in an svg capable prog (Sketchup) and continue working from there.

I was thinking of a color filter, where I could pick the color of the bluish paper to be filtered out, but honestly this is out of my league .

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help & suggestions,

Erwin

[Scotty]

Hey,
I would just lock the scanned image on its present layer and just draw the lines using freehand tool on a layer, then delete the original layer. Basically all the lines are straight lines.
Jim

[masque]

Try Mehdi eraser (live effects tool)and select your blue colour. Because it isn't a pure flat colour (a little mottled) not all the blue will disappear but if you increase the tolerance it will remove more but then might start to effect the black as its fine/feint. Playing with colour and contrast before hand might improve things.
Derek

[Albacore]

I don't know how relaxed you are using SketchUp but why not just use that? It seems a strange way of starting out on a straight forward plan. If you really want to use Xara programme do what Jim states but the easier way would to do the same thing in SketchUp with your scanned drawing and work from there. By the way have you noticed that your drawing has been imported back to front, look at the text at the top, it may be un-imortant to you for the actual drawing.

[Lexje]

Thanks for all your kind suggestions.
Perhaps a little clarification:
I'm not a real 'professional' but I'm fairly proficient with both Xara and Sketchup.
Off course always take into account that a person 'never' really knows 'all' the in and outs of a piece of software, things become even more complicated when you start using forementioned softwares in mixed situations - I often find myself trying to use Xara keyboard shortcuts in Sketchup and vice versa :-)

To the point:
I agree with doing the lot in Sketchup alone - but:
If I import the ground plan in my existing drawing (and yes, I realize it's mirrored - thanks for pointing out, but this is on purpose :-) ) the area on which I need to continue drawing is completely covered by the imported image.
That is my problem.

That's also why Xara jumped to my mind with it's transparency tool.
If such a tool would exist in Sketchup, I would be golden.
If I could enhance the image to be semi-transparent that would solve my problem.

Thanks again for your kind suggestions!

Erwin

[RichH]

If you import your bitmap image into SketchUp as a texture and apply it to a face it becomes a material you can edit. One of the properties you can change is the opacity, making it as transparent as you need it to be.

[Lexje]

Rich, thanks for your pointer,-
This is more than probably the way to go - Still experimenting though.
I'm trying to check scaling and dimensioning correctness, off course it's not ment to be super correct, but it seems fairly acceptable.

Thanks a lot! Learnt something new today :-)

Erwin

[RichH]

Glad it helped! I would definitely minimize the number of interim software packages and steps used.

[Lexje]

Very true!
On the other hand, knowing your way around with graphical formats is always a definite +.

May be helpfull to others:
Vectormagic can trace and convert an 'image' to EPS, SVG, PDF or PNG.
Available as a webservice or desktop.

There's also SVG to raster image conversion available here.

Thanks a lot!

Erwin