This beach scene (a photo for an old girlfriend's Maui vacation) didn't come out nearly as well as I'd expected, mainly because the difference in depth of the carving throws off perspective, at least IMO. The contrast, especially the face, looks odd at too many angles. I actually prefer the shallow results I previously got in .125 acrylic! What's interesting is that this is the first piece I've done where the photographic image of the work looks better than the carving itself.
This was done in 1/4" corian, cut to .21" in a single pass with a 30° bit. For the first time I deleted the rapid clearance gap using notepad, after first changing the last Z-clearance to .1" so it wouldn't be deleted on the search/delete. Total time to cut 4"x3.75" was just over 3 hours. Estimated time was 1hr 17min. This is still in line with the roughly 240% over estimate I was getting before, so I don't know how much effect eliminating the clearance gave gave me.
There's a bit of graininess because the original photo was too small, so I had to enlarge it (I used Kneson Imagener, made specifically for enlargements, which generally gives a better result than algorithms in other programs). I'm wondering if I'd get enough contrast if I used VCarve Pro to cut out a pocket and then do the carving with less depth.
At first I thought the bit I used (photo #2) might have affected quality. While both bits in the photo are 30°, the one on the right is very fine, as the tip of the shaft is cut in half, while the left bit, which I used for the first time, is square cut. (I chose the new bit because the tip of the other broke when my Z-axis didn't stop on command going down. The difference isn't visible, but it isn't as insanely sharp as before.) However, when I compared the bit profile to the cutting depth, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference.
