First photo V-Carving - River Eagle

[Bruce]

A friend of mine takes some really great pictures along the Mississippi River.  This is a Bald Eagle in action a few winters ago.

I tried out the photo carving capabilities of ArtCAM and made this wood carving. I used a 1.5mm ball end mill for the finishing cut and a 1/8" ball end mill for the roughing cut.  I used Varathane wood stain color of American Maple and Watco Danish Oil to finish it.


 

[roybartels]

Wow very nicely done. In the first picture I found the knot distracting but what you did with the finish brought the carving to life.

[Bruce]

Thanks Roy, It was my first try at photo v-carving so I just grabbed what I had, a piece of knotty pine. Surprised myself with how good it came out.

[Derek the Admin]

Looks good Bruce.

Thanks for sharing it.

[kevin]

That's awesome; the carving turned out great and does justice to an amazing photo.

[linkreincarnate]

Neat! Is there anything similar in Fusion 360? Artcam is discontinued... I've been using Easel to convert bitmaps to svg and importing that into fusion 360 and engraving it.

Really solid choices on the finishing.  It almost looks like a monotone brown picture.  I'll bet sepia style pictures would look really cool.  Like old western stuff...

[Mototech]

Beautiful, don't know if it's just the picture. But it has that really nice aged look even though you recently made it. How long did the project take to carve?

[Bruce]

I'm not sure but I don't think Fusion 360 can do anything like converting a photo image into a relief carving. Vectric has a separate program called "PhotoVCarve" (It's not even part of Aspire) which does convert photos to G-code carving. There are a couple free programs that will do something similar. "Halftoner v1.7" and "Reactor v1.2" both by the same author, JasonDorie.com.

I used the Halftoner program to do the '67 Corvette project. This was my first try at doing this. It came out ok but I was a little disappointed. I found I had the resolution of the lines set too thin.  There is a ratio between the line resolution and the overall size of the work area that needs to be worked out.   I used a White Laminated Wood Shelf and then a black stain to color in the cut area.  (I got the idea from youtube, of course)  

[Bruce]

Thanks for the kind words, Ryan. The finish cut took 5.5 hours to complete. I had some computer issues and didn't get the cut going until after 11:00pm. Luckily I was on vacation last week and just stayed up till 5:00am to finish the cut. Once it was going good I didn't want to stop it.
😜


I knew ArtCAM could do photo caving, but I'm surprised how well it came out. I keep finding cool features in ArtCAM...then wonder why they threw the thing in the round file.

[rowiac]

Jan 1, 2019 10:02:04 GMT Bruce said:

I knew ArtCAM could do photo caving, but I'm surprised how well it came out. I keep finding cool features in ArtCAM...then wonder why they threw the thing in the round file.

Autodesk seems to do that with a lot of their software tools, especially the free ones targeted at hobbyists.  Last year they killed off 123D which included a really cool app that created a 3D scan using a series of photos of an object from your phone and 123D Design which was a pretty good, simple 3D design tool.  These have been replaced by the very basic TinkerCAD and the quantum-leap more sophisticated Fusion 360.

I am just waiting for them to start charging hobbyists for Fusion 360 (once you are hooked) and killing off Meshmixer, which is my go-to 3D editing software for my 3D printed projects.

[Bruce]

Nobody cares if you have a good product or satisfied customer base. All they want to know if you are making the arrow go up fast enough on the market. We are destroying perfectly good products and ultimately companies just because the arrow doesn't go up at a steep enough angle.
Autodesk bought ArtCAM and in just two years, layed off the whole development team this time last year (right before Christmas of course) and cut the support team down to a skeleton crew (which were also cut at the end of last November now). I agree Rowiac, I think everybody is waiting for the hammer to drop for Autodesk to start charging using their subscription model for Fusion 360, using the drug dealer marketing scheme. (rant over 😠)

[Bruce]

I took a closer look at how the Vectric PhotoVcarve software works (https://www.vectric.com/products/pvc/features/vgroove.html), It uses the "V-Groove Machining" similar to how the Halftoner program works.  What ArtCAM is doing is taking a photo and creates a relief carving from it.  This is done by creating a grayscale image from the photo.  The darker area is cut deeper than the lighter areas.  So there is a real difference between what ArtCAM and PhotoVcarve do to process a photo for image carving. 

So I miss titled this thread... should be "First Photo Relief Carving", not Photo V-Carving.  🤷‍♂️

 

[ksachse]

Very nice!

[rowiac]

Jan 1, 2019 20:06:23 GMT Bruce said:

I took a closer look at how the Vectric PhotoVcarve software works (https://www.vectric.com/products/pvc/features/vgroove.html), It uses the "V-Groove Machining" similar to how the Halftoner program works.  What ArtCAM is doing is taking a photo and creates a relief carving from it.  This is done by creating a grayscale image from the photo.  The darker area is cut deeper than the lighter areas.  So there is a real difference between what ArtCAM and PhotoVcarve do to process a photo for image carving. 

So I miss titled this thread... should be "First Photo Relief Carving", not Photo V-Carving.  🤷‍♂️

 

I looked a little more into what PhotoVcarve can do here:

www.vectric.com/products/pvc/features.html

and the half-tone type carving that you describe is the first feature listed, but the third feature, 3D Grayscale Machining, looks like what you are saying ArtCAM does.  If so, it's nice to know there is still an option for those of us who didn't get ArtCAM while it was still available.

[ricko]

Aspire has a halftoner gadget but uses various holes with v bit to generate image, also has a bitmap to image tool. I recently recreated a nice 3d model of bigfoot face using vector shapes of various parts of the face and finally overlayed the 3d image generated for surface texture. See Aspires "trout" tutorial, that's how I did it. Took half a day but came out great, then I exported a a Vectrix 3D clipart for future use. Very powerful toolset.