Whoa! Yeah! It’s definitely Maui Faster! Was waiting 6 minutes… now it’s like 6 seconds. Nice!
Well done, much faster…now I have to come up with something to cut 
Very Maui Faster
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Yes, I used photoshop, but gimp or many other programs will work.
Thanks Mitch. I will check out GIMP.
Any ideas on how to get rid of the noise in this? I used Gimp, inverted and ran thru the heightmap2stl app. I have never used Gimp so could be something I might have missed.
You can use meshmixer or vectric vcarve to apply smoothing to an STL.
Don’t introduce noise in the first place. Don’t ever use a jpeg for heightmaps. Use a lossless format like png.
As Jeremy stated try to have the cleanest starting image as possible, any little spec in the original is going to translate into the model. I had a few rough edges and specks at the bottom when I made that stl so I just inserted a plane and raised it up a tad into the model to hide them and then combined into 1 solid model. If you want that exact logo you should be able to use that JD pic I posted above with no further processing needed as that is the exact file I used in heightmap2stl.
Thank you both. I figured out what I was doing wrong and was able to correct it. Thank you both again for the assistance and helping me learn.
I’m having the same noise issues, even with png input files. @KeithGraham - what fix did you find that helped?
On work machine, can’t try Vcarve until tomorrow, was hoping there was a cleanup option available w\ GIMP etc… prior to conversion.
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are you converting a JPEG to PNG? (if so, this is your noise source).
or are you starting with RAW art in Gimp and then converting to STL from a PNG?
JPG source file…
I was able to clean mine up in VCarve Desktop. After doing so it looked great. You might try that and see if it helps.
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Hello, I used the program above to made a 3d grayscale and uploaded it into vcarve pro. I made a 3d roughing toolpath with a .250 bit and a 3d finishing toolpath with a .125 bit. The roughing takes about 37 minutes while the finishing takes about 12 hours. Is there anyway I can take that 12 hour gcode file and split it into a couple different files (say 3 files, 4 hours long)?
Thanks, I will check that out soon!
Not sure why it was working so well then the errors started.
ava.exe -DXms=64m -DXmx=4g -jar “C:\Users\MICHAE~1\AppData\Local\Temp\heightmap2stl.jar” “C:\Users\Michael LaViolette S\Desktop\Eagle Banner\Eagles-grayscale.bmp” 10 0
File: Eagles-grayscale.bmp
Model height: 10.0
Base height: 0.0
Processing - Eagles-grayscale.bmp
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at com.heightmap.Main.main(Main.java:75)
Created STL file C:\Users\Michael LaViolette S\Desktop\Eagles-grayscale.stl
It did not create the file on my desktop.
So, I didn’t ready every post in this thread, but I did search: Surprised MeshCAM wasn’t discussed more : I got into using it because a few years back it was the only CAM software I could find on Mac (works on Windows too) that would let me cut stl data. I still use it for all my 3d cuts.
Anyway, you can import a bmp file directly into MeshCAM, which it turns into a height-map, auto-creates a preview for it, and cut it directly. It also has a nice smoothing tool for it as well. Still costs real money ($250), but way cheaper than Aspire.