Optimizing SVG into 123D Design / 123D Mac Stability?

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Jeff Tillinghast

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Oct 26, 2015, 4:04:46 PM10/26/15
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Hi all-- Hoping someone can help me with working in 123D Design (iMac, Yosemite). I've been building a model fairly quickly, and I wanted to import a graphic (school logo) into the model. I took the .jpg into Illustrator and made a trace, and saved that as an SVG to import into 123D Design. Once I imported the SVG, 123D slowed to an absolute crawl, and now is both unusably slow and unstable. It seems like the imported object is just too much for the software to handle stably. The image is mildly complex, but it's not ridiculously intricate. It did import fairly large, but size shouldn't make a difference with SVG, and I did resize the imported object successfully. I'm wondering if there's anything that I can do to reduce the complexity of the SVG before importing it into 123D Design? Is there a way to optimize SVG's to reduce the computing load needed to work with them in 3D?

Thanks!
Jeff

Adam Singer

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Oct 26, 2015, 7:53:39 PM10/26/15
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Not sure about directly answering your question, but if your design is completed except for the logo, another option would be to export the model from 123D design as a stl file and import it into tinkercad, and extrude the svg in Tinkercad.  When one 3D modelling program is giving me attitude, we’ve often bounced between programs for specific features with some success.  You will lose editability (and certainly lacks grace), but might get you the end result you’re looking for.

 

Adam Singer

Technology and Shop Teacher

Davidson Middle School

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Daniel F

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Oct 26, 2015, 11:18:18 PM10/26/15
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Hello,
I tried importing a svg myself (also on a mac) and didn't have any problems. What if you try importing a basic svg (such as https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Cyclohexane_simple.svg) and see if you get the same problem. It could be an issue with the SVG generation. You could also try opening the svg you generated in a text editor and looking to see if it is ridiculously large.

Daniel Franklin

John Umekubo

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Oct 26, 2015, 11:55:43 PM10/26/15
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If you did a live trace, it's possible that there are too many points in the vector image. Both Illustrator and Inkscape do this, in the attempt to get the most accurate replica, they will fill curves with multiple points (or nodes in Inkscape). If you take a look at the vector file while still in illustrator, you may be able to eliminate some of those points without losing any quality in the image. 

- john

David Malpica

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Oct 27, 2015, 12:06:55 AM10/27/15
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John is absolutely right. As a side comment, ever since apple went with integrated GPUs I've haven't found them to be specially good at crunching 3D geometry. And 123D wasn't exactly well optimized to begin with.

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neobob...@gmail.com

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Oct 27, 2015, 10:06:30 AM10/27/15
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This is taken from a response I received from Guillermo Melantoni, the 123D and Tinkercad product manager...

I know what’s happening in 123D Design with that SVG. When the tracing gets done, you need to make sure that the number of vertices on the lines make some sense. I’ve seen fairly simple SVGs that have thousands of points. Same ones with same results can be optimized to a relatively small amount of points. It also seems that someone already suggested same solution in the [123D] forum.
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