FINALLY making forward progress - this has been my holy grail for a very, VERY long time. I’ve spent so many hours searching and searching for the easy answer to this and more often than not ended up staring at a lithophane process. I’ve seen several “tease” video and websites about doing it but in most cases it’s been downloaded height maps and image files from the web - nobody seems to have posted the answer about “how to do make those files from scratch”. I’ve bought and demoed software that SOUNDED like it was on the right track only to find out it wasn’t at all what I was hoping for. I was convinced ArtCam was the missing link for me (which you can’t get anymore) but the more I looked into it the more it seemed that it was still missing the height map component I kept running into. The best…my personal favourite so far is this guy who posts EXACTLY what I’m trying to accomplish to YouTube (eight years ago) and then says “It’s our own script, only for our own use” and then disappears.
So what’s the easy answer? I haven’t found one yet. Maybe someone out there has - if you have can you let me know?
I DID however find one solution that is getting me darn close to where I want to be and I think if I keep at it I just might have it. It’s so, so close, I’m just losing a little too much detail in the process - but I think I can recover some of it post-process. This involves using the 3D mesh tools in Photoshop. The nice thing (for me anyway) is that I can watch in almost real-time as I make changes to the height map, how much farther I need to bring things forward or back.
Not sure who the dude is, hope he’s not some freak serial killer…it was just a random “portrait” I grabbed from the inter webs. This image is after about an hour of massaging through layer upon layer of adjustments. I think I’ll be able to streamline the process a bit once I fully wrap my head around this. I’m going to switch to a photo of my kids though - might as well have the effort going to something I actually want to unleash on the MPCNC.
Oh yeah - and the destination isn’t the 3d printers…it’s ESTLCam, the MPCNC and a chunk of wood.
[attachment file=“Patrick-Zbinden-Portrait.jpg”]
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Carveco is bringing back something that looks very similar to artcam. Details on the 28th I think. This version might have what you’re looking for, hopefully they do a free version like artcam express.
here’s a quick experiment at work, never used that function of the modeling side, but works well enough. if I played more with the contrast and added a bit more smoothing, he probably won’t look like a 20+ year older version of himself, haha.
NOTE: I have not done any carving with my MPCNC yet.
This info is based purely on research I have done on the subject.
From my understanding Lithophanes are Height Maps.
It depends on what you do with them after creating them.
The Lithophane craze has taken off due to 3D printing.
So all the software out there is based around 3D printing lithophanes.
Typically, you 3D print a Lithophane vertically on a raft or brim.
Not flat like we want in CNC.
Lithophane software typically creates straight gcode or stl’s.
This makes them more difficult to import into cheap CNC programs and create your own tooling paths.
I have not used this yet, but I do plan to try.
Some testing, trial and error will be involved to get good results I think.
Yeah, I had looked for months and months hoping it was that simple. Unfortunately it’s not. Aaron’s images look promising. Is that Carveco?
Lithophanes as we’ve come to know them in the 3d printing world are not height maps…or not the kind we need for true positive carving on a CNC. You can certainly use the same software and process for backlit lithophanes made on a CNC in a material like corian or candlestone. The files this sort of software spits out however are simply depth instructions generated by assigning a min and max depth to the greyscale value of each pixel in an image, white being the thinnest remaining material, black, the most material left behind (or laid down by the printer). It works fabulously for photo lithophanes which get backlit.
Imagine the black pupil in a white eyeball. The white would be carved down to the thinnest allowed depth and then this black cylinder would jump up to the thickest. In a positive relief carve in an opaque material like wood it’s gonna look awful (and it does).
A height map (of the sort I’m after) needs to use relative heights. Sure the pupil is black but it’s on the uppermost surface layer - like just after the height/depth of the nose and the brow and cheek bones.
I’m going to go back to Carveco and have a look now. Here’s hoping!
What were you building that photo up in Aaron? I don’t see a demo download for Carveco and am dubious since it appears the “sample on screen image” shown I THINK is one of the widely available pre-prepared height maps from the inter webs. I most certainly can’t afford to outlay almost $2,000 right now!
You have to take photos of a thing from multiple angles to create a bump map/height map proper. Such as a laser scan. Or you have to painstakingly create layers of grayscale via imaging software like Gimp, Photoshop, etc. Which can be done.
Lithophanes and Height Maps are not that far different. They are only different in the level of grays they produce based on the angles they can see.
Lithophanes are produced by 2d images. and work really well.
Going from blacks to whites with some level of gray’s.
If the transition from white to black could be further defined, then I don’t see how this couldn’t be possible.
the only issue is, those lines are pretty thin due to the level of detail (sharp edges) in a 2D image.
Which is why at our current state, you have to do the above to get full height mapping grayscale images.
I have to look at this deeper. There has to be an easier way.
The differences are not so dissimilar, only the current methods are.
the take away is this, “there is no way to accurately reproduce depth from a single image unless it is lit or coloured in a very specific (and known) way so that a computer program can be programmed to interpret the depth information from the colours/shadows.”
But I believe there is. and not a $2000 piece of software or Fusion360 which I refuse to use any longer.
I would love to find an easier way. The (manual) method I’ve found seems to be working okay but man it’s time consuming. But then I guess if it was easy everybody would be doing it? Haha
Vectric makes a piece of software called Photo V-Carve - It does do lithos BUT - it will also take a black and white photo and assign height profiles according to B/W density. This will do what you are looking to do - its also pretty easy on the software budget - $150. They also have V-Carve which would design and output gcode for the router. I have used their products since version 3- have recommended it to alot of people. Its very intuitive - you will be making chips in 15 minutes - also the preview tooling is great to see what the machine will do before you push the go button.
