Skip to content

Generating items from art

Two tools that make picker items out of pictures, so you draw the character once — or not at all.

Tool Input Output
Image to Picker A bitmap — concept art, a viewport capture Items traced from the silhouette
Vector to Picker An SVG One item per outline, curves and holes intact

If you have the choice, use Vector to Picker. Tracing a bitmap is a guess at where the edges are; an SVG already knows.

Image to Picker

Window → Image to Picker

Image to Picker: a character head with the transform tool active, trace settings for edge, contrast and saturation, and a Generate button

Point it at a bitmap and it finds outlines in the image, then turns them into picker items.

The toolbar

Tool Does
Import Load an image
Transform Move, scale and rotate the image before tracing
Eraser Rub out parts you do not want traced
Lasso Restrict tracing to a region
Curve Draw a line to cut the silhouette

The eraser and lasso matter more than they look. A trace of a whole model sheet is unusable; a trace of one arm, with the background rubbed out, is a picker.

Source and trace settings

Source picks what the trace reads: the image's alpha if it has a usable one, or edge detection if it does not. The status line tells you which it settled on — edge detection (no usable alpha) in the screenshot.

Slider What it changes
Edge How aggressively edges are found. Low finds only strong outlines; high finds texture and noise
Contrast Applied before tracing — push it up on a flat drawing
Saturation The same, for a colour image where hue carries the shape

Shape output controls what the found outlines become — how many anchors each shape gets, and how much they are smoothed.

Press Generate to make the items. Keep open leaves the window up so you can adjust and generate again — which you will, two or three times, before the settings are right.

Trace parts, not characters

Load the image, erase everything but one region, generate, then undo-adjust -regenerate until that region is right. Repeat per region. It is slower to describe than to do, and it is the difference between usable output and a thousand-vertex blob.

NumPy and OpenCV are both optional but both help here — NumPy speeds the trace up, OpenCV adds better edge-detection modes.

Vector to Picker

Window → Vector to Picker…

Vector to Picker: a biped template SVG with 17 named outlines listed, each with its anchor count, and import settings

Import an SVG and get one picker item per outline, with real Bézier curves, holes cut out, and the artwork's own colours.

This is the highest-quality route into the tool by a distance. Draw the picker in Illustrator, Inkscape or Figma — where you have proper drawing tools — name the layers after what they are, and import.

The outline list

Every outline in the file, with its anchor count, each individually tickable. The names come from the SVG, which is why naming your layers in the drawing program is worth doing: arm_upper_L arrives as an item called arm_upper_L, and the mirror commands will understand it later.

Import settings

Setting What it does
Size Scale on import, in canvas units
Anchors The anchor budget per outline. off keeps the SVG's own points; raising it simplifies
Use the artwork's colours Take each item's fill from the SVG
Label items with their names Draw the outline's name on the item
Cut out holes Inner rings become holes rather than separate solid shapes

The status line reports what it found — 17 outlines, 124 anchors, 17 curved — before you commit.

The shipped templates

Am_Picker ships biped template SVGs, which is what the screenshot is showing. They are a complete humanoid outline set, correctly named and split. Import one, bind it to your rig, and you have a body picker in an afternoon without drawing anything.

Which to use

  • You have a designer, or you can draw vectors

    Vector to Picker. Draw it properly, name the layers, import once. Everything downstream — mirroring, colour, holes — works better.

  • You have concept art and no vector version

    Image to Picker, region by region, with the eraser doing most of the work.

  • You have neither

    Capture the Maya viewport from the Image Manager with only Mesh enabled and a transparent background, then trace that.

  • You just need it working today

    Skip both. Ctrl+Shift+A gives you a bound square per control in one keystroke; a plain picker that works beats a beautiful one that is not finished.