I was stuck at my screen until midnight yesterday, trying to reconstruct a 3D model from old, scanned archive plans. Rhino gives us ultimate 3D freedom, but the moment you deal with a “dead” raster, you’re stuck with hours of manual tracing just to get the base scale right.
Does anyone know of a Grasshopper plugin or a specific workflow that can vectorize these legacy scans into accurate 2D geometry?
If there isn’t a reliable tool yet, I’m considering building one myself to automate this bottleneck. I’d love to get your input on whether this would fit your workflow too. It takes just 1-2 minutes:
Hi Slavic, I was wondering if you could set up a camera and photograph your old blueprints. That is if there was no distortion. Then of course they could be brought into some programs without much trouble. Basically just a digital copy.—-Mark
That’s actually my current workflow: I photograph or scan the drawing, correct the perspective, and then redraw it. It works, but it’s time-consuming and very manual — that’s why I’m looking for ways to automate the process.
I can’t speak for Rhino, but in the AutoCAD world, there have been several attempts to automate tracing of blueprints. And the consensus was that fixing the resulting vectors was more time-consuming than manually tracing them. I don’t know if there is a state-of-the-art AI augmented process that would true up vectors with the reported value of dimension strings. If so, I’d be interested.
this has been my experience as well, and years ago i developed a hacky script that generated wind turbine blades from point-cloud data. it sorta worked, but ultimately easier to manually rebuild the geometry from point-cloud sections.
If you need good digital data (orthogonal lines, minimal number of control points, clean-curvature curves, tangent fillets etc.) that will be referenced and used by others then it will be a manual process to either:
Trace/redraw the original document
Use an automated process to trace/redraw, and edit the output (essentially twice the work)
If you need something to visually appear correct for imagery or machinery (stills/videos, laser etching/axidraw, maybeeee cnc engraving etc.), then automated processes will get you there with minimal post-processing. usually…
the Shaper Trace tool looks pretty neat, but that’s still along the lines of making something that just needs to visually be correct. example:
if a stencil for a gameboy advance (5.7" in width) is off by 1/64" of an inch, that’s alright, the error is pretty small compared to overall object. plus it’s a handheld toy, not a building.
if a scaled drawing of a building is off by 1/64", that’s not acceptable because you could be off by several feet. in addition i don’t see any marketing material about the control point density of the curves which tells me it’s probably a mess of control points
Wow, that’s an amazing tool — just a little different from what I need. But many thanks for recommending it; I have never seen this before, and it looks like a really cool tool and app.
I completely agree with you, it’s just that this constant reworking is really exhausting. I was hoping to find a way to streamline it, or possibly use some kind of tool. I know it will probably never be more accurate than remodeling everything carefully from scratch.
