making sticker part

[Oh-Seong KWON]

Hi,
When I tried to make sticker part, I faced a problem with Sticker Generator.

I saved 256 color BMP file from scaned real sticker image like below.





I tried to convert it to DAT file by Sticker Generator and got below result image.







When I saw this DAT file by LDview 4.1 and MLCAD 3.3, it showed like below.



I was disappointed at the result image so much.



Corresponding sticker part is here : http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg...22303i.dat
It shows very high quality like below.
It looks like not from BMP image.





Here are my questions:

1. Why couldn't I get correct DAT file by Sticker Generator? Did I neglect any important option or anything else?

2. How can I get better quality sticker rather than from BMP file?

[Damien Roux]

Sticker generator converts a bmp to a Ldraw file.by replacing every pixel by a square quad. So it will look aliased and file will be very heavy. I guess you need to create the sticker the same way patterns are created to get better results. There is not really straight forward solution to make stickers as far as I know.

[Oh-Seong KWON]

In case that I used 24bit color in BMP file, Sticker Generator worked like below:



It showed warning message to ask paletted bmp.




It showed incorrect preview.




It showed incorrect result file.


So I don't think that this problem came from 256 color BMP.

[Damien Roux]

I cannot see your pictures, might be a problem from my side..

As I remember I was using very few colors (not more than the 16 very standard one (4 bit)) and then recolored it with MLCAD. I'm not with my computer now so I cannot test but give a try with less colors to see if it fix it. I remember doing the pictures with MS Paint, maybe the software does matter also.

[Stan Isachenko]

I think better use bmp converter from LDDP. Steps.
1. You have to create you picture using few colors(you can draw it in vector and convert to bmp or png without smoothing)
2. In Photoshop use Image->mode->Index palette. And save bmp file.
3. Convert.

[Philippe Hurbain]

You may also consider other tools to create stickers, such as LdrawPatternCreator or Quad2Dat. Requires (lots of) manual work, but result is far better!
There is also svg2dat, still in its infancy but promising. And for text only stickers, Txt2dat makes wonders.