Lithophane using PhotoVCarve

I did this using Vectric PhotoVCarve. The idea fascinated me and they really are quite wild to see up close and personal. My original photo is not great, but I like the result.

I did this in two passes. The roughing pass was done with a 1/8" ball nose mill, with a 40% stepover. The finishing pass was done with a 1/16" ball nose, with a 10% step over. The finishing pass took almost 4 hours! The piece is roughly 5" x 5".

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Woah, what was the material you used @gwilki?

Thanks, Chris.

It’s just a scrap of white corian. I’m lucky to have friends who use it and give me off cuts. This started out at 1/2" thick. I “re-sawed” it to get one slab at about 1/4", then used the Mill and the spoil board bit that I bought here to take it down to a consistent thickness of about 3/16". I understand that, within reason, the thinner, the better, as you want good light transmission. This could maybe be a bit thinner, but not much…

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Ah corian! That’s great that you’ve got some very giving friends :grin: from what I understand I can see why thinner would be better, but only to a certain degree. Possibly if you go even thinner then the result would be very delicate but then if you put it into a picture frame then you could still see the effect while the frame protects it?

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Chris: I am happy with the thickness that I ended up with. I’ve seen some brought down to 1/8" and they look almost the same. I think it depends somewhat on how much contrast there is in the picture. The more whites and blacks, the greater the necessary thickness difference in the final carving. That’s my guess, anyway.

For my next trick, my wife would like me to take a black and white picture of some interesting landscape and carve it, then frame it in a light box. It will look interesting even with the light off, then really pop when the light is on.

All that is fine, but I’m not where I can leave the Mill alone for several hours while it does this. I need to learn more about GCode so that I can do it in batches of a couple of hours each. So far, I am failing at getting it to start precisely where it left off. Much learning to do. :slightly_smiling_face:

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