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Auto trace in Moho Pro 13

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 6:22 pm
by A123rick
Whenever I import an image into Moho Pro 13 and go to draw as I've seen in some video tutorials there is no option to trace the image? :( what am I doing wrong? I am very new to Moho, I've selected the layer on the layers panel and gone to the draw tab but no trace image??

Re: Auto trace in Moho Pro 13

Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 8:19 pm
by hayasidist
IIRC Trace was dropped from 13 because of copyright / IPR ownership issues.

Re: Auto trace in Moho Pro 13

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 1:41 am
by alanthebox
You can go to View / Select Tracing Image, though. Or are we talking about different things here...?

Re: Auto trace in Moho Pro 13

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:46 pm
by Greenlaw
Different thing.

Select Tracing Image allows you to trace vector art from and image manually.

Auto-Trace allowed you to generate vector art from a bitmap image automatically.

I've never been sure what the value of importing a Tracing Image is over importing to a normal Image Layer for tracing. Tracing Image seems to more limited than an Image Layer...after importing the image, Moho pre-determines the scale and placement, and all I can do is trace it as is. With an Image Layer I'm able to transform the image, crop it, and now in 13, I can even edit/append the image in Moho before tracing it.

As for Auto-Trace, I think the implementation in Moho 12 and earlier was just ok. There are much better Auto-Trace tools in dedicated vector drawing programs. Better to do it there and import an SVG.

TBH, I would much rather see the developers work on a better Freehand tool than spend any effort on a new Auto-Trace tool.

Re: Auto trace in Moho Pro 13

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 4:10 pm
by Greenlaw
If you need to auto trace for Moho 13, here's a free online solution:

https://www.autotracer.org/

I tried it out with a random image from the web and imported the result to Moho. The render on the right side is the raw, unedited auto traced image.

Image

Considering this isn't an ideal image for auto tracing, being very low-res and having a lot of gradient colors, I think it turned out ok. I limited the colors to 16 to keep it from generating too many 'junk paths'. If I really needed this, I would find a higher res source image, apply some point reduction and tweak some vectors. The website's default SVG output settings seemed to work fine for Moho.