This project pairs well with a Nomad 883 so I figured I’d share it with you folks. I bought a 6" x 6" x 0.5" acrylic plate from McMaster-Carr and used my 0.125" flat end mill and 0.125" ball end mill to machine it. This clever individual posted a tutorial on how to convert an RGB image to a height map.
https://mattferraro.dev/posts/caustics-engineering
I’ve found it best to maintain the 512x512 image size so I resize JPG’s using imagemagick but any conversion tool will do.
You can feed the image to a script that he wrote in Julia. Like Perl or Python, it is just another programming language that happens to be good at handling maths. You can install it following other tutorials. There was one hiccup. His focal length was set to 1.0 meter but that yields a very small height delta across the surface so I manually set it at 0.20 m instead. You are just looking to have enough height so that when you sand out the tool marks later that you do not accidentally smooth away important surface features as well.
Good Luck!