How to Import Graphic Art into SolidWorks

You have a killer new design in a picture in .jpg format that you want to make into a 3D rendering in SolidWorks to preview a cut, but don’t have an easy way to accomplish it. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do this in SolidWorks! For this demonstration I created a quick mandala in black and white and saved it as a .jpg. In this post, I’ll run through just how easy it can be to move that .jpg picture into SolidWorks to prep it for laser cutting.

Importing a Picture into SolidWorks

Once a file is ready to be imported, it’s a simple process to get it into the SolidWorks sketching area. First, select to draw a sketch and a plane for that sketch. After the sketch is started, go to the top toolbar to select Tool -> Sketch Tools -> Sketch Picture. This will open a window to navigate to your picture and select it. Find the location that your file is saved and select it. SolidWorks will import the picture into the drawing space with the bottom left corner at the origin and the side panel with several options like this:

Resizing the Picture in SolidWorks

Now that the picture is in SolidWorks, it needs to be resized to fit the correct scale for the part to be created. To do this, I will click on the green check mark in the sidebar to accept the picture and draw a line for the expected size of my image. For example, if I would like my image to be 100mm wide, I will draw a horizontal line and dimension it to be 100mm. Something looking like this:

Now I double click on the picture to open the picture menu again. I always resize my image by locking the aspect tool to keep the image in the correct scale. Then I resize the image until the width of the image matches my 100mm line like so:

Tracing the Picture in SolidWorks

The final step of moving the picture into SolidWorks, is to actually draw the picture into the sketch. There are two ways to go about this. If the picture is a .jpg of low quality pixelation, you will likely need to hand trace it out. I typically end up mixing up the tracing between a series of lines and splines to get the correct trace of the picture. It’s laborious but ends up working out in the end. If the file has a higher quality or the lines are high contrast with the background, you will be able to use the embedded trace function in the sketch picture tool. This is a free add-on in SolidWorks. To enable it, go to Tools -> “Add Ins…” and enable the Autotrace like so:

If Autotrace is being enabled for the first time, close out of the part and open it back up to be available for use. Open back up the sketch picture by double clicking on the picture and you’ll notice that there are now left and right arrows on the upper right corner of the side menu:

Click the right arrow to bring up the trace settings. Here will be several options including the selection tool for tracing, the begin tracing button, options for how to preview, as well as sliders for adjusting the tracing.

I typically use the rectangle selection tool and then expand that around the image I would like to trace. Under the preview settings I keep both the source image and traced geometry selected to see the trace updating when placing with the sliders. Next, I select “Begin Trace” and then play with the sliders until I get a sketch that matches up with the image. Once the perfect match of brightness, contrast, color tolerance, and recognition tolerance is met, click on apply to create the sketch of the picture. Click on the green arrow on the sidebar menu to get out of the sketch picture. Finally, right click on the picture and select delete to remove it from the drawing space. Now that the sketch is ready to go, perform whatever 3D manipulation is required, an extrusion or anything else. Just like that we have our final part!

I hope this post will make life easier creating sketches out of pictures in SolidWorks and that you learned something along the way! Feel free to check out any of our free project files to start cutting today!

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