Hi Graham,


Michael is right about ArtCAM being better for organic reliefs. In the image of the girl on the coin,
ArtCAM did a "relief from bitmap" which I had to clean up and sculpt to match the drawing.


But, for really simple 2.5d designs that don't require much of an organic look,
if you just wanted to mill some grooves that would suggest the look of hair
or feathers, some CAM programs have an option to do a
"centerline engraving" or V-carving on a 3d surface, using a vector line.

As you can see, I brought the same image into MoI and traced over some lines.
I probably could have done a better job if I had done my feather this way..:-)

In the CAM program, you would enter in the depth of the cut . The width of the tool
determines how wide the cut is, so you could do a few tool changes to vary the width.

You can draw the feathers or hair with MoI's freeform sketch curve, keeping the lines
spaced adequately, being mindful of the width of the tool and the overall proportions
of your design. MoI exports an IGES file that can be converted to a DXF in another program.
I'm not sure which one would be best. I think CorelDraw does it, but from what
I can remember, it breaks up the lines pretty badly.


Jesse