My wife is heavily pregnant and unfortunately we lost one of our dogs on boxing day, it was her favourite too. He was so friendly and a cheeky little one too. With her hormones being as they are its hit her really really hard so I got roped into making some kind of memory for her.
My problem is I dont quite know what to do with this one. She has a particular picture that she loved and wandered can it be converted into either an engraving using the Nomad on clear acrylic and then I’ll build a base with LED in to light through the pane. Or would I be better finding some way of turning into a 3d relief?
Just not sure how I would do it either way. I have Inkscape, Affinity Designer, CC, Meshcam and Aspire (though I hardly touch this due to still learning a lot)
Therefore any help or hints whatsoever would be massively appreciated.
I don’t have Aspire, but apparently it has “Photo VCarving Toolpath”, may check that ?
Another nice option when working from pictures is lithophanes, with a backlight (check the many post on lithophanes here on the forum). That second picture would be perfect for that use (lithophanes work best where there is a lot of contrast, a single point of interest, and a clear background.
Diamond drag engraving on acrylic could work, but from my experience works best with vector designs, I have not seen one mad from a picture
Seems like a good opportunity to try the link that @mikep posted the other day about RasterCarve. Looks like it would work and wouldn’t cost any money to try.
you first need to decide if you want the backgroud to be there for a full picture effect you do, but for other designs (like the one I put above or acrylic) you don’t.
You can use gimp to just erase the background from the picture.
then you can also use gimp to increase the contrast (using contrast and color level tools) so that you make a bigger difference between “black” and “white”… this needs to be pretty extreme (you can use gimp to make the actual black/white picture)
in inkscape you can then trace the bitmap into a vector, which you can then load into tools like carbide create or aspire
Try this free on-line tool that provides similar results to Photo VCarve. You get GCode from a picture that you can run on your machine. I saw some projects done with this on a Facebook group and it looks promising.
RasterCarve should work well for this project. I’ve found that using MDF and a sharp 20-30deg engraving bit at .080" depth gives the best results, like that shown here. I’ve also tried it successfully with a pen plotter for greatly enhanced contrast.
Also, make sure to suppress acceleration ramping if your machine has it – you’ll easily cut your machining time in half.
@luc.onthego: what Facebook group, out of curiosity?
