Hi Michael,

ArtCAM seems to be the most popular one in the US.
I've never used any other relief modelers but I'm aware of
Cimagrafi , Stenza and Type3 There are probably several
others..

I don't think of it in the same category, but there's RhinoArt, a plugin to
Rhino and also Matrix, (a jewelry design program with Rhino as it's engine),
which has an "Art" module. The thing I've encountered with surface modelers
and making textured surfaces, is that the meshes rapidly grow in
size as detail increases.

A friend of mine sent me a intricately textured model to mill that he had
created with C4D and Rhino.. it was a nice model, but it was too big for me to do
anything with it in Rhino. (He bought himself a PC with a dual processor and 4
MB of memory to handle those big files).

The same model that was 124 MB as an STL, slimmed down to less
than 5 MB when I imported and converted it to a relief in ArtCAM.
What's up with that? I guess some file formats are more efficient for highly detailed surfaces.

-Jesse