Short of hand-drawing all the vectors, is there an easy way to generate vectors for this? (I don’t want “centerlines”, I want all the edges vectored). Can Illustrator do this easily? (You can tell how little I know about Illustrator from my question).
Thanks for any suggestions.
EDIT: I have the ability to hand-draw the vectors. I lack the motivation. 
Import into inkscape
Click image
Click “path” menu at top
Click “trace bitmap”
Click “ok” (it’s black and white. It should be fine with default)
Drag new vector off the top of the old image
Delete old
Save as .SVG or whatever file
Done
30 second job with CorelDraw.
ext_wall.zip (122.5 KB)
She asked how to do it, not for people to do it for her. I’m sure. At least explain the process with the different programs
You can use image trace in illustrator. Import, hit image trace dropdown in the top toolbar (there are a variety of settings) then hit the expand button to create the vectors. You can double click the image to go into isolation mode and delete the white pieces to remove the background. Or use direct select tool then choose select - same - fill color.
It helps if you take the image into photoshop first and convert it to a bitmap and clean up any stray pixels.
I’d do this the way Pearce recommends. As part of the “trace bitmap” tool in Inkscape, there is an “edge detect” option for a single scan path. A threshold of 0.5 is a good starting value.
Thanks everyone! I really appreciate everyone helping me out … it’s the diverse knowledge base that makes DMS what it is! I value having different approaches because sometimes one of them just won’t work for some reason.
@Brian … that looks interesting. I have to see the SVG file in something that understands vectors, but it’s interesting. I want to make sure the vectors are actually there and not just a filled image.
@sk8nmike - thanks for converting this for me. I find it odd that there is one black brick in the conversion that doesn’t appear in the original.
@PearceDunlap and @darrent - I plan to try this in Inkscape (as soon as I can get it to come up on Remote Desktop).
@ryan - Illustrator befuddles me, but I plan to try your approach the next time I go to the Space (don’t have AI at home). When you said clean up the pixels, did you mean spurious disconnected pixels, or did you mean pixels created by jpg anti-aliasing?
Inkscape is free, I’d recommend just installing it at home: https://inkscape.org
Update.
The Inkscape thing did not work for me. It nicely generates paths from the bitmap but it generates two vectors for every edge - despite fiddling with all the settings.
Image segment: 
What I expected: 
What I got: 
However, the Corel-generated SVG from @Sk8nmike imported and stroked just fine.
I still plan to try the Illustrator approach since AFAIK I still need an .ai file to use on the Thunder(s).
I’ve been using Illustrator for 15 years and it still befuddles me. If feature creep were an olympic sport Adobe would take gold every year.
I mean cleaning up stray pixels in photoshop. It’s just easier to go in and erase or clean up things before taking it into illustrator. Not much you can do about pixelated jpgs. anti-aliasing may help some but raster is what it is.
OK, thanks. I already had it in Photoshop, and I temporarily used a stroke effect on the layer to continuously check for stray pixels. I find that helps see the strays much more easily.
Adobe’s design philosophy … if the software was hard to program, then it should be hard to use! 
Thunder uses dxf files, they don’t have to be AI but I hear they come out with less issues. Most vector programs can save dxf files though
Sorry, my intent was not to teach as I doubted she had coreldraw but rather to show what programs other than Inkscape could do.
Turned out great … esp. since Inkscape didn’t seem to render my image the way I wanted. So thanks!
A slight derailment to this conversation try the app adobe capture - take a picture…bam vectored.
It’s amazeballs but I know it’s not available for all phones.
Open in illustrator, hit Live Trace, hit expand. You can adjust settings as needed. Another option is to use Adobe Capture app on a phone or tablet.
Lol no worries. I haven’t hand traced something in like 10 years. Live Trace and a little node adjusting here and there is so much easier
I was also going to promote Adobe Capture. It’s free. Only on mobile devices. But can handle photos (like jpegs and pngs) you send it. Slider to adjust edge detection.
I do usually use Inkscape for this.
Vinyl Master Cut on the vinyl cutter is another option. It imports and exports in various formats.
Vectormagic.com is popular. I’ll cut out the one @Brian mentioned. Thanks!
We should look again at getting a couple of licenses for Corel, at least on the design PCs. @Sk8nmike
Corel draw doesn’t allow us to do multi seat, so we wouldn’t be able to have different users log into it like we do for other programs
Curse you @talkers! I need to get to bed but your post got me curious to know if I could find any more. And I did. This one…
…produced this…
7e2951d1869f55a3ad1765676e7ece9f2a47c879.zip (70.8 KB)
The output is dramatically different than the earlier one. It appears to have arc-segments but I do not have the tools on this computer to tell for certain.
