We use cookies to personalize content, interact with our analytics companies, advertising networks and cooperatives, and demographic companies, provide social media features, and to analyze our traffic. Our social media, advertising and analytics partners may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services. Learn more.
I have a friend who invited us for the weekend to his lake house on Smith Mountain Lake, Va. While there, we went to a local boutique and they were selling a balsa wood 2.5D cutout of the lake for over $1000.00. While it was nice, I thought I could do better (opinion of course). So I went onto the EROS website at USGS where they host very nice topographic relief imagery of each state - and grabbed the Smith Mountain Lake area:
I then converted the image to grayscale in photoshop, and made sure to truly blacken the actual lake:
Then into Vcarve pro, and it is fairly easy to make a 3d model from a grayscale image. Played with it until I got it like I liked it. Here are a couple of pics of the final product:
All in all - a fairly reasonable process. It is quite a workout on your carve tho - with over 14 hours of carving or so - a lot of which was very active Z positioning. So make sure you are dialed in before you give something like this a shot.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing the process. Carving 2.5D nautical charts was one of the biggest excuses I used to rationalize the purchase. The ones at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival of San Juan Islands are about 1/3 the price of the XC1000.
In carve pro, under the models tab, there are two icons… One to trace a bitmap, and one to create a model from a bitmap. Create the model, then choose the wrench to edit the settings…
Apparently, I don’t have that option. I am on 8.012. I see the trace bitmap under drawing tools. I do not have any bitmap options under the model tab. What version are you on?
