Carving Highly Detailed Griffon Into Aluminum

[machinemoney (Chris Hayes)]

What do you guys think about carving out this griffon into 1/4" aluminum?

I’m a bit lost.

Would it be engraved then cutout around the edges?

Is there anyway to give it more of a 3d look to really make it pop?

Do I need to outsource some kind of image processing? Someone to manually turn it into an STL file etc?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

STL is a 3D format — do you want it to be a 3D model?

It should work to just trace the file as it is and cut that — it would of course be ideal to get a better quality original image, ideally one which is b/w, not greyscale.

[machinemoney (Chris Hayes)]

Not sure if 3D is really what I need or if it’s worth the extra effort. It would probably look best with 3 layers each 1mm apart in thickness:

1. back section: back wing, back ear, back legs
2. mid section: abdomen, front legs, tail, head
3. front section: front wing, front ear

Then maybe a mild taper around all the outside edges.

Trying to get a high end result but without killing myself in the process

I’m pretty good in photoshop so I could chop all those sections into layers and rebuild the image into b/w, high res after tracing.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

The thing is, you don’t want pixels, unless you are going to use a tool such as:

Halftone generator on Cutrocket

This was announced/demoed in a limited way a while back — had occasion to reference it in a support ticket recently, so here’s the text from that: We have a halftone generator which will accept black and white images, so you will need to convert any image into a black and white picture. That is the only type of picture the generator will accept. Help file: https://cutrocket.com/halftonehelp.php

Consider, the original was actually linework — it was actually an engraving, done by applying a tool to a material and cutting away at it in lines (or if a copperplate, by using burin to make depressions in a plate) — if we could re-create the motion of the original artist, as to some degree we do with a player piano, we could get a better result, which more closely approximated the original.

[machinemoney (Chris Hayes)]

@WillAdams

The thing is, you don’t want pixels, unless you are going to use a tool such as:

Halftone generator on Cutrocket

Consider, the original was actually linework — it was actually an engraving, done by applying a tool to a material and cutting away at it in lines (or if a copperplate, by using burin to make depressions in a plate) — if we could re-create the motion of the original artist, as to some degree we do with a player piano, we could get a better result, which more closely approximated the original.

Ah so I want to use illustrator to make a vector for 2D or for 3D I’d have to make it in Blender or SolidWorkd right?

I did a couple hours research and it seems people are using: carveco, vetric aspire or fusion 360 to do 3D carvings. They either try to semi-auto extrude the high points using software, or they manually build the image in zbrush, or other 3d software then import to fusion.

Seems the zbrush part is tedious but could be outsourced for $100 on fiverr.

I might have to just stick with 2D for the time being. Will need to research this more in the future.