I’m working on a commission for a 3D terrain map of a hike in RMNP. My heightmap is one I made in QGIS using 1m super high resolution data from the USGS. Nothing groundbreaking here or anything, and I’ve done a million of them.
CC Pro v776 Beta, though I’m getting the same issue in a couple recent production builds as well.
What I’m running into is strange artifacting in the toolpath simulation where the terrain looks more like contour lines on a topographic map as opposed to the smooth terrain features that I’m used to. This also shows in the toolpaths of the simulation.
The part that is really throwing me off, however, is in the Show 3D preview in the model tab, I’m not getting the weird topo type of hard contour lines when I preview the heightmap, just the normal pixelation that I’ve come to expect.
Honestly I’m not completely sure, it’s been six months or so since I’ve done terrain maps seriously. I think I’m going to have to open a ticket with C3D, see if I can get some of the older Mac versions of CC and go from there.
If you build the model at 2.889 total height, each pixel/voxel is about 0.011" high.
If you only build the contoured part of the model, each voxel will be about 0.007" high
I would forego the base, except for maybe something very thin to make sure there is stock there.
So round off to stock size of 1.8", make a 0.036" base, and add the 1.764" image to that.
I tried it & still see the steps in the toolpath simulation. I also tried to blur the original image a bit, and it looked like it reduced the size of the steps, but they are still there. ??
Thanks Will; make sure I’m understanding this correctly, please. If I create a base with separate geometry I’ll have better results than if I add the base in the geometry for the heighmap?
It’s strange that you’re seeing some steps too even after tweaking stuff. I’ve filtered that heightmap pretty hard through QGIS which improved things but didn’t eliminate them.
I may go back and redo everything with a slightly lower resolution on my DEMs, and see if that helps me. Appreciate your help on this!
Fortunately, I’m not super crunched for time on this commission, so I can play around and try to solve the issue.
I think what happens is it uses the 256 layers over the total height of the 3D model.
So if you have a 1" base & a 1.5" contoured surface, the base is going to use up 102 levels, leaving 154 levels for the actual cut area. Try it with no base at all, and then the 3D portion should use all 256 levels.
Set the stock thickness to 1.5" in this case. And then the base just occurs because on your 2.5" workpiece it’s only cutting 1.5" deep.
Right now the STL plugin I use for QGIS has depreciated to the point I’ll need to rewrite it, and I just haven’t found the time yet; I know just enough coding to be dangerous lol.
If I can’t find a solution, however, that’s the route I’ll try next. Thanks!
