I find that the best sort of image to work with is obviously one
made up of lots of lines, some of the best are those nice little
painting illustrations that are always part of the instruction sheet for
model kits.
If you're using one of these, set your scanner to text mode,
200dpi seems to work best and scan. Then clean up the image in DPaint,
this is the key step, so don't skimp, get an image made up of smooth
sharp lines.
If you are using a colour image, you need to get it into two
colours, for this either start drawig on top in DPaint, then stencil
your new lines and rub out the image. One method that can work, is
to use an Emboss command (have a look at PBM tools), this will
effectivly outline different blocks of colour, you can then just touch
it up in DPaint. Beware that you tend to loose a lot of dimensional
accuracy doing this unless you have a really hires image, so be careful.
If the drawing is to scale, mark a scale on it, a simple
graduated bar, preferably one horizontal and one vertical round the part
of the image that you are interested in. When you clean up the drawing
make sure these scale marks are clear. You can later use these marks to
scale the bitmap to an imagine grid.
Now use ConvertIFF/ILBM, say no to the add faces requester, and
in a minute or so all the lines will appear. Now all you have to do is
to go into pick points mode and tidy it up a little more. Save this.
If you have a plan, front and side view you can position these
objects so they are visible in their respective window, but not visible
in the other windows, i.e position the front view so it is say, 500
units in front of the world-centre etc. then redraw speeds are quite
nippy.
Using this method may be a bit more memory intensive than using
a bitmap, but you can zoom in to see finer detail. Also the images can
be to a known scale and you can scroll the windows about without loosing
the image.
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