Meshcam ART as 'poor mans' answer to Aspire bitmap import?

Hi.

I use VCarve Pro and the one feature that I miss from my days of using the Carvewright software was the ability of that package to import a grayscale bitmap and turn it into a relief carving. Sadly, VCP doesn’t support such a feature but for another $1400 Aspire does ( plus a WHOLE LOT MORE ). I don’t and can’t spend that money at this time.

Does anyone use MESHCAM ART to create a component that can be imported into a VCarve Pro project? Thoughts on the process and does it provide you with a solution that just works at around 1/3rd the price of Aspire?

There is an opensource tool which will make a .stl of a pixel image: https://github.com/jeremysimmons/heightmap2stl-gui

A few other options are on the wiki, see https://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAM#Images and https://deftware.itch.io/pixelcnc

I just found out about a free Microsoft product that you can download for Win10… You might want to drop it into the wiki. I just rested it out with a few bitmaps that I used in the past and it works great so far.

It’s called “3D Builder” and can be found in the Microsoft App Store

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Thanks! 3D Builder is listed, but I didn’t realize that it will open pixel images — adding that now.