Shadow-tree

I was at a rustic homegoods store where I’d seen a piece, similar to and larger than this, hand carved. I figured my robot could do it for me.

I first painted a large redwood slab white. Then designed a tool in Autodesk Maya that procedurally draws trees. After ‘drawing’ a lot of them, this was my favorite, so I saved it’s alpha out as an image, and brought that into Easel for carving. Only took 20 min for the rough pass (.25" 3-flute upcut bit) and another 20min for the finish (.125" 3-flute upcut bit), both running at 90ipm.
I did custom paint touchup after, to make the tree ‘wrap around’ the left-hand side of the stock.

I plan to do this again, but do the finish pass with a v-bit instead: Should get a lot more small branch detail, and a nice beveled effect overall.

The whole piece measures 17x30x1.5":
cncTree_wall

The shadows are pretty extreme in this image, The cut is is only .125" deep. And I was a bit to hasty with the pics, and hadn’t yet sanded down the first pass, so you can see some toolpaths in the main part of the tree trunk.
cncTree_held

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looks cool… and I would keep the tool paths… looks natural!

That is really cool!! Nice job!

Awsome use of a rough slab.

The detail on the fingers is awesome! They really pop! :wink:

Really, you did awesome on this project! I might have to try an idea or two now!

Thanks for the words everyone.

@MarkA.Bachman : I got that slab from a scrap pile, had to cut it down to fit the xcarve. Whole thing was still around $60 if I remember correctly. Wood not cheap!

@DamnitJim : Actually the fingers are 3d printed :wink:

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