Check it out, drawing buddies:
http://maxim-s-barabash.github.io/ZebraTrace/

I've added some photos of my first drawing using ZebraTrace to the drawbots flickr group (to which you all should be contributing) - clicking the photo will take you there.

>Does it draw in a spiral?
Yes, *mostly*, in this case anyway. That's decided by the order that the Freestyle SVG exporter sorts things. There were some peculiar exceptions, when some odd polys got drawn here and there, perhaps because I edited them by hand in Blender or something, but in general it started in the middle and worked its way outward.

I'll post detailed results of my gondola experiments soon. Gotta get ready for 'trick or treaters' right now. Happy All Hallows' Eve!

Hi N (saw your stuff in the flickr pool - cool!)

In Blender, while in edit mode:
1. Select all faces (keyboard a)
2. Go to Mesh/Faces/Beauty Fill (Shift Alt F)

That should fix much of the problem. Then there's the laborious bit of going over the mesh with a fine-tooth comb, looking for poly edges that don't look good to you.

3. In edge mode, select an edge that's not arranged as you would like it, hit Ctrl E, and then select Rotate Edge CW (or CCW). Repeat until all the triangles are pretty.

It's possible that there are times when it's better to select only a portion of the mesh before doing a 'beauty fill' -- doing the whole mesh in separate batches. I don't know if this spiral is one of those cases.

Hope that get's you through it!

one more question kongo, please.
when you trasnform the file in Zebra you leave the default setting or do you change? because I have done changes but the don´t work well, or the spiral is clear o is too saturate I didn´t found the good point.

thanks Kongo I´ll play and if I have good results I´ll post them!

I don't know why you had trouble get into edit mode. I just did a quick run-through on the process to refresh my memory, and everything worked as I expected. Here's what I did:

1. Export SVG from ZebraTRACE
2. Import SVG into Blender
3. "a" to select all
4. "7" to be in top ortho view
5. "." to center the drawing in the view
6. "cntrl-j" to join all the curves
7. go to "Object/Convert to>mesh from Curve" (or "Alt-C">Mesh from Curve)
8. "tab" into edit mode to view polygons
9. Most likely, you'll want to go to Mesh/Faces/Beauty Fill (Shift Alt F) to reorder the faces a bit.
10. If there are still edges you'd like arranged differently, you can select an edge and hit "cntrl-e" and select one of the rotate edge options.

When I did my refresher run-though, some of the polygons didn't get made when I did my convert to mesh. I don't know why. There were vertices, though, so I could select three verts and hit "f" to make a face.

What's shown in your image is correct, but yes, it probably has too many polygons for your needs. In ZebraTRACE, there's a setting for "quality" under "Advanced" - if you reduced quality the final result of this whole process will be less polygons (IIRC).

Because of frantic Christmas activity, I can't write a detailed explanation of Blender's Freestyle renderer (that's how you get SVGs out of Blender). There's an old thread about it, but it's out of date (though it should still work).
http://www.polargraph.co.uk/forum/polargraphs-group2/drawing-techniques-forum4/render-3d-meshes-to-svg-using-blender-and-freestyle-thread213.0/
The latest version of Blender has everything you need built in, but it's only a release candidate at the moment, and I haven't had time to try it out:
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.73/
I'll give it a go after Christmas, and hopefully have time to write about it.

The default settings for Freestyle will only add lines for the silhouette and "creases" where the angle of the crease is greater than or equal to a set threshold. Since the SVG you've imported is perfectly flat, there are no creases within the default threshold. There are a couple ways to address this:

Option 1: In the Render Layers panel, under Freestyle, in the "Edge Detection Options:" category, change the crease slider to 180 degrees. Now all the edges will be drawn by Freestyle, because they are within the 180 degree threshold.

OR

Option 2: While in edit mode, select all the edges of the SVG object you've meshified, then hit cntrl-e, and select "Mark Freestyle Edge". In the Render Layers panel, under Freestyle, you should have "Lineset" selected, and below, in the "Edge Types" category, put a check mark next to "Edge Mark". Now all the edges you've marked will be rendered.

Option 2, while slightly more complicated, allows you to directly pick and choose which edges will be rendered by marking and unmarking them. If you don't care about that level of control, option 1 is easiest.

What part are you having trouble with?

(Please keep in mind I haven't had to think about this subject in over 2 years, and haven't used this technique since 2013. I'm going to be a bit hazy about the details).

Step 8 switches you from 'Object Mode' to 'Edit Mode', in which you can manipulate the selected object's vertices, edges, and faces. With the your object selected, hit 'Tab' on your keyboard. Alternately, you can enter edit mode by clicking on the pull-down menu that (in the default layout) is just below the 3D viewport.