Hi,

is this the same T-Slines that's available with Rhino? If it's the case then that may work for me but it's quite expensive if I'm not mistaking.

Thanks,
Felix

Yes,that is ! (i'm provoking Michael..)

Felix,

Say yourself some time and frustration and don't go down the heightmap greyscale road. The bottom line to get the results your looking for you will not get them from 2d graphics. Trust me I tried and tried..lol. I have always been an avid woodworker and tool whore, I sears one day and saw a demo for Carvewright..I was like hmm 2k ish...I can import a photo and carve it...damn I was thinking of all the cool stuff I could add to my work. Needless to say it never worked out that way. Carvewright has a propiatary file system and they have made it so anyone could do cnc...no gcode, no tool paths..just import a photo and carve away. I was completely disappointed with the results. They looked like crap as carvings go. None of the flow and contours would be right either up when was suppose to be down or vice versus. At the time in 08 I never touched a 3d program.

I became the king of photo manipulation..lol you name the program to make a photo a depthmap I tried it and wasted a lot of money on some looking for the holy grail of depthmaps. It was such a waste of time. The guys in the CW community are the kings of depthmap to cnc pattern. But the results are never that good. Some have produced some good patterns with photoshop gimp etc...but again not that good and the time involved bizzare. One of the first programs I boughtt was zbrush for the EXACT workflow your mentioning - depthmap to model to clean up/sculpt in zbrush. Never worked good. Faces for example..the people always looked like aliens with bugged out eyes, noses going inwards etc. I tried inverting etc, gaussian blurs, changing the colors of the greyscale image...it was almost impossible to clean up in zbrush.

Finally I got talking with this guy in the CW community and he was like if you want good results learn how to model with polygons. Here is site for the guitars he makes with the cw http://liquidguitars.com/ seeing his work..I knew he was right. CW came out with an .stl importer and I started making some simple stuff and was very nice and clean..contour etc EXACTLY how I wanted them. The guy who makes the guitars uses lightwave alone..he has been modeling since the 90's for a living. He also tole me avoid artscam as he calls it and aspire..he was like learn how to model and you can do anything you want in cnc.

I took his advice and started with MOI..he didn't like nurbs but hey I love this program...Then it was time to learn quads..Trust me I know what your saying about the learning curve..LOL bigtime..but you will never regret the time spent for cnc models. I look back and go man if I just nutted it down with modelling and left the photo's alone I would be that much further along..lol and a few more bucks in my pocket.

The way I do stuff today is whatever I want to make I try to think which of the two programs to start with..Moi or silo..meaning which peices are going to be faster and easier in produce the desired result. I make the peices in Moi and Silo then generally import them into zbrush and asseble the model there. I don't care about the high polycount as most cnc models have a high poly count. Export obj and then convert to .stl and carve away.

I still use photo's for reference images or a "texture"..I use zbrush lightbox alot for adding texture. I still suck at human faces but I am practicing..attached is one I am trying to do of Jimi Hendrix. I made the frame in Moi, blocked the head out in silo..brought it all into zbrush and compiled to one there...now have to sculpt to get better..lot of worked left on it. I am using a photo laid out in light box to add some detail. The other tricky part I am trying to keep this as low relief...75 in depth..makes it harder for me. Oh well its fun to learn and practice.

Other hard thing there is next to nill on the net to help model to 2.5D for cnc. I just went through the full 3d tutorial and started applying the basics I learned. Bottom line your time will best best spent on Moi, Silo and sculpting like sculptris/zbrush. Final thing that sold me was I started chatting with this guy a bit and he told me all I use is 3ds max and zbrush..some of thee nicest looking models for cnc I have seen. http://artline3d.ru

Good Luck

you have also some program like that with 2 photos gives you a 3D files of your model ;)
free for non profit project
Made by a French guy but in English ;)
http://www.photosculpt.net/

Hi jpaluck,

it's another story but on top of all that, I'm a french speaking guy and though I'm not so bad in english it is still somewhat of a pain to write, it takes me forever.

Before I go on, I must thank you for the links and your thought on my dilema, these guys do amazing work. I just took a brief look and if ever I can do stuff the quality of the artline3d guy, god would I be happy.

I'm a 100% sure that using Moi for me is not an option any more, I'm stuck with it, I just love it. Believe it or not, I kind of feel not so bad with Scultris and possibly it would be similar with ZBrush (much more potential I believe). But Silo, even if I have no doubt it's a very good piece of software, it's like riding a bike backwards for me LOL, so even if it was free I don't think I will spent more time with the free trial. I can say basically the same for 3D-Coat they both feel very awkward to me. I must add that above all my other discrepancies, I'm a lefty, and a program like Silo, even if I can remap all the shortcuts, would still be a bit problematic.

Just a tought about Carvewright, I happen to see one in action and I was very disapointed with what I was looking at but I also happen to see a piece done on oak that was more than acceptable, so for quality I assume it depends on a few things. A minus I have is that it is to narrow and lastly but not the least, no 4th-axis possible. I've got very limited space in my shop and if I put in a CNC there, it must be able to do quite a lot because a few things of would have to get out to make room for it.

I admit I had my doubt about the displacement maps and what you wrote convinced me it would be a lost of time to go that route, so thanks a million for that. So I guess I'll have to rethink all this again.

Many thanks, lots of food for thoughts,
Felix

Hi Felix,

Wood crafting very often requires some kind of artistic touch, like sculpting, bas-relief, VCarving, inalay and micro detailed surfaces that are hard to produce with a NURBS based software, and requires an SDS approach. I can't imagine an oak or a grapefruit leaf modeled starting from curves, extrusions, sweeps and so on. On the contrary, also often in such artworks there are some components (rims, structures) that are best modeled using hard surfaces techniques (NURBS). To reach your target, especially if you later need to obtain a CNC toolpath, I recommend you to try Aspire, an artistic CAD/CAM package by Vectric. It has powerful vector based 2D to 3D tools, sculpting and bitmap to 3D support to obtain very complex bas relief, that you can easily integrate in your project. Aspire also includes a good CAM software and many postprocessors that cover almost any kind of CNC milling machines and routers.
You can also consider Luxology modo to add details to your works. It is more complex and expensive compared to Silo. But it has a great advantage on other SDS based modelers. You can model in a low subdivision degree and use many tools to deform your surfaces using textures and images (for example, with vector maps, normal maps and so on): the model is then represented with incredible high details, even if the real geometry remains very light. As soon as you are sastisfied with the results, you can "freeze" the geometry, and any effect you have applied is then transformed into a real geometry that you can mill with a CNC machine. As far as I know, this feature of modo is almost exclusive.
Another advantage is the presence of a good renderer, that you can use to present your projects before their actual phisical production.
Attached you will find an image of a rendering of a particular of a furniture, done with MoI, modo and Aspire.

Good luck

- Pietro

The king of modeling for this sort of thing is ZBrush ;)
All works is Zbrush for real stone carver results!
by Tomrobs


























They use also Moi ;)


for blend with Zbrush ;)


By Nicolas

Yeah, I've been dying to buy Z-brush.....

Cool... I tried Zbrush several times but I can't get used to it..

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

< I tried Zbrush several times but I can't get used to it..
yes some try and learning curves are necessary
But now many videos are existing ;)
Like these ZClassroom about the last release ;)
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161537-ZBrush-4R2-ZClassroom-Movies.-Update-3&p=895791&viewfull=1#post895791

I agree with you,Frenchy Pilou
I'm approaching to z-brush:i have bought Scott Spencer's book :Advanced digital sculpting(Italian title)
first i tried sculptris,i tried to do a simple carrot....disasters! (i'm nurbs addicted like MajikMike)
this is because sculptris don't offer so many tools like his big brother(z-spheres..masks..etc.)
i think that if you want to do human detailed models you have to be a real sculptor,or,at least, have something in you..a natural approach to real clay sculpture...
so i say to myself:Mauro you cannot do everythig you want...but i'm following z-brush,i plan to use it in the future

Hi Mauro,

> i think that if you want to do human detailed models
> you have to be a real sculptor,or,at least, have something
> in you..a natural approach to real clay sculpture...

Yes, that's something to keep in mind when you see some fantastic video of someone sculpting a magnificent figure - the main thing that actually makes that possible is the skill, experience and well practiced technique of the person doing the modeling, it's not like the software itself just magically makes that stuff happen.

It's a difficult skill set to achieve, so it's something that you should expect to invest quite a bit of time in to practice and refine your techniques.

But it is a great path to work on to get those kinds of sculpted detailed results.... Just be prepared for a high learning curve and a lot of time investment.

- Michael

Hi everyone,

I couldn't begin to thanks you enough for all the examples, suggestions and ideas posted here.

I believe at this point, that in someway the tools or software programs are irrelevant to a certain extent and it's the one in the driver seat that make all the difference. As it is, I realise I'm a newbie at all this 3D stuff and I pretty well know the route one as to take to become a better "driver", ie, lots and lots of studies and even more hard work to devellop the necessary skills. Thanks all for reminding this to me.

As I was looking for ways around these basic principles, I stumble across one of Blender 3D sculpt mode videos and in it there was this suggestion of trying to devellop your basic skill using blender (which as more sculp features then Scultris and much less then ZBrush) and from there when you get comfortable with the sculpting tools as well as learned some methods to use them skillfuly and then, if needed, you can migrate to a higher level, with ZBrush if I want to go sculpting or something else if I want to go SubD.

The only unfortunate conclusion I can make at this time, is that ounce I get out of Moi I can't come back with my sculpted objects to "glue" all this work together in Moi but maybe in another life...

Thanks you all again and my best regards,
Felix

Hi Felix,

> The only unfortunate conclusion I can make at this time, is
> that ounce I get out of Moi I can't come back with my sculpted
> objects to "glue" all this work together in Moi but maybe in
> another life...

Yup, that will probably be the case - basically those sculpting programs do not work with the same kind of object data that MoI uses itself which are called NURBS surfaces. Instead those sculpting programs work with polygon mesh data where objects are made up of a lot of little polygon facets.

You can export from MoI into a polygon mesh format, at which point MoI will dice up its NURBS surfaces into little facet pieces. But it's not easy to start with diced up little facets and go back to a larger NURBS surface except in special cases...

So yes once you have exported from MoI into a sculpting program your object will be made up of a different kind of data than MoI uses for modeling with and you'll need to be working with a polygon mesh program to deal with that data instead of MoI at that point.

There are actually a lot of various different ways that 3D objects can be structured - every 3D program is not necessarily based off of the same technology and that means that you can't necessarily transfer objects both directions between different programs using different techniques, some kinds of transfer are more one way.

- Michael