The Epiphany with Sodipodi
December 4th, 2003 by lafnlabOkay, Sodipodi isn’t actually a 3d program, as the story category might suggest, but the image I created below was based on an idea I had for Blender/MakeHuman…and it has the Blender logo.
I have this idea for a surfer girl, and since I want to make it in Blender, I figured I would give her bathing suit the appropriate logo. Now in the past, when I designed clothes (I have a bachelor’s degree in Apparel Design and Production), I would create the technical drawing with the Adobe Illustrator 7 Academic Edition. Now that I am out of school, and running Linux, I can’t use this because Adobe is for Windows only (I believe they stopped making Mac versions) and even if they had it for linux, I doubt I could afford it.
There are a few programs out vector-based drawing programs out there for Linux, and in my experience, most of them are fairly lacking. While I don’t necessarily expect an Open Source program to have the functionality of Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw (vector-based drawing programs for Windows), I do a certain amount of functionality. I have tried xfig, Kontour (a/k/a KIllustrator), Figurine, and Sodipodi. All of them have given me a large amount of frustration, but I kept in mind that I had a long hard battle learning Adobe Illustrator as well. In keeping with the idea of coming up with technical drawings for garments in a vector-based program (I can’t fathom trying to do it in the GIMP), I decided to give Sodipodi another try.
I don’t know what happened, but last night it all more or less clicked into place. I was able to make the drawing in a few hours. It wasn’t without problems, but the ones that arose, I was able to work through fairly well. One of the things Sodipodi has going for it is that uses the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format, which is an international standard like JPG. It will also export to the raster-based PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format, which is also an international standard. The image above is the PNG file, which can also handle transparency, as above.
Of course, Sodipodi has some faults, too. I am using Sodipodi 0.32, so maybe some newer versions will have more functionality. Anyway, one thing that I find a minor annoyance is that it can only export to PNG, and not JPG. I like PNG, but JPG is more common (though lacking some functionality). Today, I just tried to print this image out, and it popped up a little window asking if I wanted to print by pixel or by page, and then Sodipodi crashed and died. At first I thought I maybe hit the wrong selection, or the wrong button, but I tried it a few times with the same result. I ended up using the GIMP to print it out (note: use the “Line Art” setting, not the “Photo” setting). Another shortcoming IMHO, is the lack of a layer control tool. You can move selections to the front, to the back, etc, so it acts as if layers are there, but there is no separate window to lock certain layers or hide them from view. This is something I used fairly often in Illustrator, and I still use in the GIMP, and even Blender. Another thing, that I can’t remember if it was an issue in Illustrator or not, is the eyedropper tool doesn’t seem to want to work when objects are “grouped” together. What I did for the image above was just memorize the RGB settings for each color. More complex images though, might require writing down the settings. All of these problems are more annoyances than anything. I can work through them at the moment, but it is still nice not to be bothered by them.
Overall, I think I am going to like Sodipodi. It was nice to be able to do some designing again, and I know I will end up doing more. It might be nice to put a new section in the gallery/porfolio section of my website. Maybe I’ll convert some of those old sketches from school and put them in the portfolio. We’ll see. I would put this image up, but at the moment, Gallery is giving me fits, saying it can’t find ImageMagick on the server, which is needed to turn the huge images into thumbnails. I’ll play around with it a bit to see if I can get it working.
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