I have a friend who invited us for the weekend to his lake house on Smith Mountain Lake, Va. While there, we went to a local boutique and they were selling a balsa wood 2.5D cutout of the lake for over $1000.00. While it was nice, I thought I could do better (opinion of course). So I went onto the EROS website at USGS where they host very nice topographic relief imagery of each state - and grabbed the Smith Mountain Lake area:
I then converted the image to grayscale in photoshop, and made sure to truly blacken the actual lake:
Then into Vcarve pro, and it is fairly easy to make a 3d model from a grayscale image. Played with it until I got it like I liked it. Here are a couple of pics of the final product:
All in all - a fairly reasonable process. It is quite a workout on your carve tho - with over 14 hours of carving or so - a lot of which was very active Z positioning. So make sure you are dialed in before you give something like this a shot.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing the process. Carving 2.5D nautical charts was one of the biggest excuses I used to rationalize the purchase. The ones at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival of San Juan Islands are about 1/3 the price of the XC1000.
In carve pro, under the models tab, there are two icons… One to trace a bitmap, and one to create a model from a bitmap. Create the model, then choose the wrench to edit the settings…
Apparently, I don’t have that option. I am on 8.012. I see the trace bitmap under drawing tools. I do not have any bitmap options under the model tab. What version are you on?
