I’m trying to design catchall trays with dog faces, the idea is to customize them for my brothers and sisters to match their respective animals.
I’m using a 3/4 inch bowl bit to pocket, then a 60 degree v-bit for the details of the dog’s faces. I’m using Vectric Vcarve for these projects, and setting a flat depth on the v-carve toolpath if that matters.
Anyway, the noses look weird to me. I’ve tried different styles, for example this is my brother’s elkhound Loki:
You could try changing how the Vector is carved instead of a V-Carve. Use the V-bit to do a contour cut “on” the vector. Maybe just do that for the nose?
In general, the way you have these setup, the carved parts are the dark parts of your design. They look funny because if you look at it too much, it doesn’t look like a dog’s nose because of the depth. We all know what a dog’s nose looks like and their not cut into a dog’s face. I think if you filled those with black epoxy, it’d look great.
That said, you’ll lose your mind if you keep looking at the dog’s nose. The only people that won’t think it looks great are you and all of us that you made stare at, and zoom in on, the dogs’ noses.
How’d you do the vector of their dog? Or are they just vectors of the same breed you found online?
Thanks for the feedback, you’ve pretty much put into words what was bothering me. The more I stare at the nose, the more ridiculous it looks.
These designs were created by using AI, specifically Bing Image Creator, which I then brought into Inkscape, and traced / edited / optimized, before importing into Vcarve. A little bit tricky do formulate a prompt to get a good design, but results are way, way better than I can do on my own.
The “dark parts” are the carved parts as you’ve pointed out.
For example, here is the Elkhound design before importing into Vcarve:
I like that idea. I’m still just getting started with Vcarve so I’ll need to mess around to figure how to do that. Might need to redraw the nose into outlines instead of solid fill I’m guessing?
Still, I think I need to modify that for what I’m doing here because this is a catchall tray, and I don’t think I want the geometry ‘proud’ of the bottom, it would be too thin and most likely easily damaged?
Going to see what I can do to “reverse” just the nose area, maybe.
Dog noses are weird in general. Dog noses can detect infra-red heat, this allows puppies that haven’t opened their eyes to find mom’s teat. Dogs also have directional smell allowing them to quickly and accurately determine where a smell is coming from. In addition to this they can also tell if a scent is older or newer helping them track. There is a gland in the dogs nose that no one knows its function.
