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Sunday 2 June 2013

Silver Bullet Cutting Machine

I recently bought myself a new cutting machine and have been creating vector files to work with it. 

For those of you who don't know much about digital files, the files you take on a digital camera are bitmap files usually in the jpeg format but there are others.  Another type of file is a .svg which stands for scalable vector graphics file which is made up of mathematical points.  If you have a look at this file it is has an xml format and the reason why it is called scalable is because it doesn't matter how big or small you make the picture it doesn't lose it's definition unlike a bitmap file which if you magnify it becomes a series of squares.  A cutting machine is able to use the mathematical points in the file to cut the shape or picture.

Here is the picture I took of a cheetah at a sanctuary in South Africa and next is the .svg file.  So the cheetah would be cut out of white paper and to show it I have put it on a black background.
The photo had the cheetah's tail cropped off so I had to guess and looking at it now I think I have probably made it too short so will have to lengthen it.  Interestingly the end of a cheetah's tail is striped rather than dotted which I ascertained from other photos I have.

1 comment:

  1. That's totally amazing, Ann! Your svgs are so intricate... I've never done anything that detailed. The cheetah is so beautiful. Amazing being able to photograph one in real life!

    Shoshi

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