Creating a shape from a photo

[Aerospaceman]

Hello All,

I am a very new and green Visio user.  I would like to know anyone's ideas on taking a photograph of an object and using that photo to create a dimensionally and proportionately accurate Visio shape if that object. 

The ultimate goal is to take aircraft maintenance hand tools and convert them all individually into 2D visio shapes. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Aerospaceman

[vojo]

There is an article somewhere on this site on how to do that.

In essence, its akin to tracing paper:
   - drop the image
   - lock it from selection (drop on background page....or make it some really large group so that you know if you selected it by mistake)
   - use lines and shapes to copy over the picture (set transparency to 50% so you can see how you are doing).
   - color some what (transparency will throw colors off somewhat so just get in the color ball park)
   - when done, group the lines and shapes, set transparency to 0%
   - move beside picture and touch up colors.

since photos have shading and light source...may take some work to get realistic view
There are various tricks to mimic light source and shading in visio...other articles.
 

[Caleb Lusk]

Do you have the document in pdf format?  If so, you could use a program I just discovered called "pdf2picture" before you insert into Visio.  If the pdf is in true vector form, you will actually be able to ungroup the picture within Visio to modify as needed.

You can download a free 30 day trial verision which I did and it works great.  I am probably going to buy it since its only ~$50.

Hope this helps out too.

Caleb

[Yacine]

Inkscape comes with a quite good vectorisation module, that will give you svg-vector files. You would then import the svg-file in visio.