Forum

Welcome Guest 

Show/Hide Header

Welcome Guest, posting in this forum requires registration.
Pages: [1]
Author Topic: The first of my machine
RedStar
Newbie
Posts: 11
Permalink
Post The first of my machine
on: December 12, 2012, 02:29
Quote

Hello all,

I'm all a bit new to this drawing thing.. A Polargraph SD vitamin kit showed up at my door late last week!! 😀
I thought I'd share some test small pics that my machine has made..

Everything here comes from the same source image: http://www.colorsimulator.com/grayscale1.jpg
The plan was to use this gray-scale ramp to get an idea of how well the machine can reproduce it....but that didn't really work out to well..

Lets look:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/107846153/PolarTest/var%20freq%20square%20wave.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/107846153/PolarTest/var%20size%20square%20wave.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/107846153/PolarTest/solid%20square%20wave.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/107846153/PolarTest/Circles.jpg
(I'm at work now and just scanned in the drawings...)

Ahh, The size of these drawings is just under the size of a A5 paper.
Drawn on scrap paper with a Artline ErgoLine Fine 0.4m
grid size of 10
speed of 1000 ...It was going to slow, so i made it work faster 😉
Accel of 800
(pen and other settings where left default)

I'm not sure what happend to the ramp but it looks like the machine has good accuracy.?
I think maybe my grid size was far to small.
Circle looks the best for a gray-scale ramp but was so slow (so I stopped it..) and the pen bled heaps!
Solid square wave is just that....solid....

I still need to do scribble, maybe I'll change the grid size first..?

All in all I'm happy, Thanks Heaps Sandy!!!!
Can't wait till I get my hands on some bigger paper!!
When I get some time/paper I'll take a photo of the machine at work.

Tips? All Welcome
sandy
Administrator
Posts: 1317
Permalink
sandy
Post Re: The first of my machine
on: December 13, 2012, 21:04
Quote

Redstar the experiments are great! Love seeing big panels of drawing like that - then I realised they were small panels - even better! Sharp corners - a nice set up - quite beautiful.

Yes a small grid size means that there isn't enough space for the pentip to express more than a couple of levels of density - there just isn't room for more than three or four strokes before it's full of ink. That said, even at it's most dense, there was still plenty of white paper showing through, so you could conceivably knock the pen size down a bit and might be able to squeeze another level of density out of it.

Circle is interesting but it's so slow (for a few technical reasons). The only time I've ever used grid sizes smaller than 40 or so have been with the scribble pixel, but you've got to lie to the machine about the size of the pen tip. Scribble works by figuring out how many waves it needs to draw using the standard wave algorithm, but then draws them in random directions instead of in a neat row. Because of this, some end up short, some overlap, some go nowhere. So there would only be four points drawn in the most dense pixels with your settings. I would set the pen size to something like 0.1 and see how the darkest pixels get compressed (or otherwise).

Cool beans! Thanks for sharing the pics - great image tests.

sn
RedStar
Newbie
Posts: 11
Permalink
Post Re: The first of my machine
on: December 29, 2012, 22:43
Quote

Thanks for that Sandy,

Sorry for the late reply, but being the season fir it I was away..
Thanks for the tip on pen size, I seem to lack a dark dark shade.

Here is something I drew before going away,
Image
sandy
Administrator
Posts: 1317
Permalink
sandy
Post Re: The first of my machine
on: December 30, 2012, 16:14
Quote

Looks cool!
RedStar
Newbie
Posts: 11
Permalink
Post Re: The first of my machine
on: January 8, 2013, 05:52
Quote

Thanks Sandy!

I think I've cracked the 'no dark dark nut'. Every time I turn the machine on it changes the pen size to 0.80... Making this 0.40ish gives me full dark and more shades between that and white.
Here are some marks from the machine mid drawing,
Image
(This was drawn with a motor speed of 2000 and aceloration of 1900!)

Image
(This was done with a with a pixle scale of 2.0 and motor spd of 1000)
sandy
Administrator
Posts: 1317
Permalink
sandy
Post Re: The first of my machine
on: January 8, 2013, 09:09
Quote

Great stuff Redstar, yes the default pen width on startup is 0.8mm, it always needs to be set otherwise. That's actually the reason that the controller queue is pre-loaded with it's pen width - because I kept forgetting to change it manually.

Love the scribble drawing - I've never done one with skip-blanks, or a mask before. The little isolated lines at the edges of the letterforms are ace!

sn
Pages: [1]
Mingle Forum by cartpauj
Version: 1.0.34 ; Page loaded in: 0.018 seconds.