New to my xcarve— I have seen many projects where people carve the outline of a body of water with the name such as for a cabin or lake house or what have you… Are y’all making these outlines yourselves or is there a source for them? I’d like to make one for the York River in VA but can’t find just the outline anywhere and my attempts at image tracing it into easel have been pretty bad. Any help??
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I take google map screenshots of lakes and have a friend who is a gaphic designer do the outline tracing for me in a design program.
I’ve heard of people using https://www.fiverr.com … a kind of online designer workshop where a simple custom outline trace or whatever can be had for $5 or $10.
Drew
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I think many are using Inkscape to create SVGs, and it is free.
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That too! Easel is definitely not the place to be doing robust design work. Not what it’s made for.
Hi ChrisRader1,
Below is my workflow for terrain/water features.
I use the online utility Terrain2STL to create 3D terrain maps for carving.
From the map above, the generated STL in meshmixer looks like this (perfect for 3D carving with Aspire or Fusion360):
If you are doing 2.5D carving, take the generated STL and slice off the land terrain in Meshmixer using the Plane Cut tool, leaving the waterway behind. Then take a screenshot of the waterway in Meshmixer from the top, like so:
Crop the screenshot to the map only, then feed it into an image tracing application (Illustrator used below) to create vectors from the image. For something like this, I prefer Illustrator’s Image Trace tool using the Shades of Grey profile.
Then you need to tweak the generated vectors until they look good and can be cut with your bit.
This process takes time (not to mention the learning curve for the software) but produces very good results.
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Chris,
Could you upload a picture of the River that you want to use and could you post a picture of what you want it to look like.
Thanks
Russell
Not sure which pictures would work best. These are screenshots from google maps. I’m looking for the york river from the opening to the Chesapeake up to West Point.
I’d like something like these–
Those look good, they were cut out and engraved using a laser, I’m sure you could do something similar on the X-Carve. Let me know if this is what you’re looking for.
Thanks
Russell
That’s perfect! Thanks a ton man. Gonna be a gift for my dad who lives on the river.
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Ok, Awesome. If you need something else just let me know. Post pictures when you’re done.
Thanks
Russell
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