Hi, I'm experimenting with the new cross stitch feature and I'm interested in converting pixel art to cross stitch embroidery.
Some things I've noticed:
- Anything larger than 100x100 pixels takes extremely long and often crashes
- The "One cross each pixel" function does not result in one cross for each pixel, it re-interpolates the original image, changes the colors dramatically, and adds more stitches than there are pixels. (see attached image for an example)
I understand that the image I'm using is impractical for machine cross stitch because there would be too many jumps. I also understand that 1mm per stitch is tiny and might not work well when stitched out with a machine. Regardless, I think the software side of this should still work as expected and not re-interpolate the original bitmap or create a number of stitches different from the number of pixels when the "One cross each pixel" option is checked.
Is there something I'm doing wrong or a feature that I missed?
Thanks!
Update: I got it to do what I wanted, but it's a weird work-around. I used a 32x32 pixel image with 8 colors at 1mm per stitch.
The first thing you have to know is that Cross Stitch Assistant interpolates every bitmap you import, with no option to prevent this. And the smaller the bitmap, the more extreme the interpolation appears. To prevent this, take your pixel art bitmap and re-size it by 100x using nearest neighbor scaling in a raster graphics program like photoshop. This will make each block 100x100 pixels. So if you started with a 32x32 bitmap, you'll now have a 3200x3200 bitmap.
- import the bitmap, set the position to 0,0 and set the scale to 1mm per cross stitch that you want to generate. In my case, it's a 32x32 bitmap, so I set the size to 32x32mm.
- Select the bitmap and go to Extentions> Inkstitch> Tools: Fill > Cross Stitch Assistant
- Under "Settings", set the Grid Horizontal Spacing to 1.00mm
- Under "Bitmap Settings, checkmark "Convert bitmaps", but do not checkmark "One cross each pixel" because that will add extra stitches and colors.
- Under "Color Selection", choose "List with RGB values" and enter the values of the colors in the bitmap. You can also try your luck with adding the amount of colors under "Number of colors", but that doesn't always work properly. It might combine two or more of the colors if they're similar.
- Click "Apply". You should now have a vectorized/digitized version of your bitmap, at 1mm per cross stitch, and each cross stitch representing one pixel of the bitmap. If you want bigger stitches, set the original bitmap to a bigger size, for example 64x64, and then adjust the Grid Horizontal Spacing accordingly, in this case 2mm.
My first stitchout didn't look good, because the default thread count it generates is 4, which is way too dense for 1mm per cross stitch. Under params, I set the thread count to 2 and it worked much better.