Relief carving

Projects
1

So I’d like to create a relief map of CA and have some photos embedded in the workpiece for a road-trip memento.

I can get the elevation maps of CA from USGS, what I want to know is what’s the best way to create a 3D surface from the greyscale image-map I’ll generate from that data. And then I’ll want to edit the resulting surface to punch holes for photos to be printed and shown, add inlays for arrows pointing to the photo location, etc.

So I need full-on editing and image height-map carving, with the editing happening after the height-map has been imported. I’ve been looking at applications and one that seems to fit the requirements is Aspire, but it’s $2k. I was wondering if anyone had cheaper ideas :slight_smile:

2

You could step it down to 2.5D and just layer stacks of material together.

3

If you can find a topographical map you can carve each layer
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/03/get-a-3d-cut-wooden-map-of-any-place-on-earth/473952/

4
5

Why don’t people just include a link to the PDF manual on their websites ? It’d make life so much easier… Autodesk are particularly egregious in this manner - I’ve spent a good hour this morning trying to figure out if artcam can do what I want, but the time was spent fighting the website, not absorbing information.

Anyway, from what I understand from the Fusion 360 website, it seems to be more of an object-based app, with physics and simulation etc. Although I see image import as a feature, it’s annoyingly undocumented anywhere as to what you can actually do with the imported image.

Thanks for the idea though :slight_smile:

And thanks again! The Accutrans software looks very useful :slight_smile:

6

If you can find an stl you can carve it.
http://jthatch.com/Terrain2STL/

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