Aspire 9 3D Carving Capability

[garymkrieg]

I installed Aspire 9 Trail Edition to see if I can get it do a 3D carving of a photograph. Most automated programs want to assign the height of the carve area based on it's light or dark quality. That will not work in this case. My photograph has three obvious areas, a foreground, a middle ground and a background. My plan is to break those elements into three individual images and then import them into Aspire. Each imported image, background, middle ground and foreground, will need to be placed at a certain Z height range, the background image at the bottom third of the one inch thick material, the middle ground image in the middle third and the foreground image in the top most third of the material. Once these three are imported and properly positioned I need to merge them into a single component.

After researching I can find no tutorials that might point me in the direction that I should go to accomplish this. I know next to nothing about Aspire, but am looking for someone that will point me to a set of tutorials or a video or something that I can reference to try and get what I want to do done.

Any ideas?

Gary

[mtylerfl]

You could...

- edit the photo into three separate ones and import each photo layer separately to create your models from

- create a component from the single photo, make three copies and trim away the unwanted parts to make your three layers, then use the modeling tools to fill in holes/gaps and create final models for each layer

- create your layers from the single photo by judicious and skillful use of the modeling tools to make the three tiered appearance

Without seeing the actual photo, all or none of the above may be suitable. We can only make guesses, unfortunately, on an "unseen photo"!

[garymkrieg]

Michael, thanks for the quick and thoughtful response. If I understand you correctly each of these three options are all getting to the same end product correct. I think I want to go with the first option and actually create three separate parts of the image in three different bitmaps and then import each one into Aspire. My issue is, as I import them how do I position them in a certain area of the Z thickness of the material and lastly how do I merge the three imported components into a single component for tool pathing?

Gary

[mtylerfl]

Hi Gary,

If you are making thin overlay components of the photo layers, you create an underlying shape of the appropriate height/thickness using the modeling tools and place the thin overlay on top of each (different height) underlying shape

Again, without a photo to look at, I'm flying blind with my advise!

There is a tutorial at the Vectric site showing how a photo-based model of a Trout is done using underlying shapes and a top layer of a thin photo component. Same principle-ish for what I think you are wanting to do, except you'll be merging three sets of component layers to form the final composite.

[garymkrieg]

Thanks again Michael, I think I've got a direction to go now thanks to you.

Gary

[mtylerfl]

You're welcome, Gary.

[jonnylbluejeans]

I never saw the trout tutorial, very cool. I had been bringing photos into illustrator and tracing with a smal number of colors to get my vectors and importing.