So, I have this file, and I have this buddy that lives in Virginia. They have had this coin series, and he collected them. Now he sent me a request to carve him a wall hanging.
So, I have this file, and it is a PNG photo that I got from some official Virginia site. I never could find a digitized image.
So, I have this CC Pro free trial, and I imported this file (PNG) into it. It produces a 3D model, but of course it isn’t acceptable because this isn’t the proper PNG for that purpose.
Where do I go to convert this PNG file to a PNG file that is acceptable to CC Pro?
CC Pro needs a heightmap image as input, so first it needs to be a grayscale image, but mostly it needs to accurately represent the high and lows in the image. So in 99% of the cases, a regular image/photo converted to grayscale won’t work, because chances are the lighting is such that highlights and shadows do not match the relief of the piece.
For a coin, you may be able to import that PNG image you have in Inkscape and auto-trace its features to get a set of 2D vectors/outlines of the coin features, and then you could import that in CC (non-Pro) and set flat heights yourself via toolpaths at multiple depths. But getting nice 3D curvy surfaces from a regular picture…not easy in the general case.
Can you share that image maybe for better advice ?
Nice coin. Unfortunately this is what I was talking about, there are highlights and shadows that do not match the expected height for things, and no easy way (that I know of) to make that into a 3D object, but someone else may know a trick.
I would maybe look at other options ?
Photo V-carving it ? (If you have Vectric VCarve that is…)
Make it a lithophane
trace it in Inkscape and engrave this with a diamond drag bit on metal? It’s not going to be fun though, here’s the (poor) result that I got playing around for a few minutes, Inkscape gurus may be able to do much better
So, I’m looking around for a solution and came up with this STL file. However, I should notify @fenrus that his STL2PNG online program gives me an error code. Since the creation of the STL was so simple, I’m not surprised that the result has a problem, but perhaps its me again? I imagine it is a blank file.
