To those who want to try SvgToDat (and maybe also for Travis he he's still trying to improve the prog):
After some try and some patterns authoring, I can say that at the moment, the best is to avoid overlapping areas in the SVG file, otherwise there will be a lot of overlapping triangle after conversion. This can be done easily in Illustrator.
Then, as the program only takes splines anchor points into consideration, the curved path have to split into smaller straight lines. This can be done in Illustrator by adding control points and then by using the "simplify" option with straight lines.
Then, when all colored area are polygon (one group per color) the program can be ran and gives really good results.
But it's not over yet: colors has to be change manualy to Ldraw ones using MlCad or whatever program.
Then, sometimes there are BFC problems, so this needs to be checked with LdView.
After that, there is a good chance that edger2 will find many unmatched edges. I was able to correct that using unificator. It should work for almost all the gaps.
Finnaly, decimals needs to be rounded, and triangles converted to quads if possible (using Datheader for example).
This is the procedure I used to make 3068pb12. I ended with only two errors caused by very flat triangles and quads, nothing really difficut to handle apparently.
This is my feedback, I hope it will help Travis to improve this wonderful program, and help users who would like to use it.
If one has some questions about Illustrator, I can do my best to help, but I'm not a guru at all. I first really started to use it last week when Stan gave his torso patterns. But as I knew Photoshop already, Illustrator was not that difficult to handle for basic things like drawing a 2D pattern.
After some try and some patterns authoring, I can say that at the moment, the best is to avoid overlapping areas in the SVG file, otherwise there will be a lot of overlapping triangle after conversion. This can be done easily in Illustrator.
Then, as the program only takes splines anchor points into consideration, the curved path have to split into smaller straight lines. This can be done in Illustrator by adding control points and then by using the "simplify" option with straight lines.
Then, when all colored area are polygon (one group per color) the program can be ran and gives really good results.
But it's not over yet: colors has to be change manualy to Ldraw ones using MlCad or whatever program.
Then, sometimes there are BFC problems, so this needs to be checked with LdView.
After that, there is a good chance that edger2 will find many unmatched edges. I was able to correct that using unificator. It should work for almost all the gaps.
Finnaly, decimals needs to be rounded, and triangles converted to quads if possible (using Datheader for example).
This is the procedure I used to make 3068pb12. I ended with only two errors caused by very flat triangles and quads, nothing really difficut to handle apparently.
This is my feedback, I hope it will help Travis to improve this wonderful program, and help users who would like to use it.
If one has some questions about Illustrator, I can do my best to help, but I'm not a guru at all. I first really started to use it last week when Stan gave his torso patterns. But as I knew Photoshop already, Illustrator was not that difficult to handle for basic things like drawing a 2D pattern.