Valentine's day gift

The material is all hard maple. I stained the inner spacer, then assembled it and clear coated it all with a water/oil hybrid brush on varnish.
I created this in VCarvePro using input from an old Vectric project created for Aspire.
Carved on the Long Mill using a 1/4" ball nose for roughing and a 1/16" TBN for finishing.
The back panel is a simple dish mirroring the dish on the front panel. I added a personal note to my wife with my diode laser.


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That’s really nice, Grant. I’m sure your wife appreciated it.

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That’s a beautiful vase, Grant! Love it!
I need to figure out how to make 3D carvings from 2D drawings. How’d you do it?

Marty from Kingston, ON :canada:

@ApexWoodworks High praise, coming from you, Marty. Thank you.

As I said in the post, this was an old Vectric project, available for free on their site. They did it in Aspire. I did it in VCarvePro.

To your question, I don’t have Aspire, which would allow me to create 3D models from 2D drawings. I have access to an older version of Aspire, but it’s not convenient, so I seldom take advantage of it. For excellent tutorials on doing that, look at Michael Mezelick’s youtube page. He is a wizard.
For this one, I just used three pieces of Vectric clipart, a dome, a dish and the rose. The outer shape is the dome. Inside of that is the dish. Then the rose just sits in the dish. This one really is quite simple in that respect.
You can’t see the back, but it is the same as the front, minus the rose. I used my laser to etch a personal note to my wife.
Before starting on the CNC work, I drilled dowel holes through the centre piece on the drill press. I used that as the “template” to drill shallow holes in the back and front. It was just easier to do the holes this way than to mess around with two-sided jobs for the front and back.
When the CNC work was done, the glue up was easy since the dowels held everything in place.
Thanks again for the compliment. I have always admired your work.

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Do you think this could be done with the free version of Vectric?

@Jens There is no free version of any Vectric software. There are trial versions and, no, you cannot run gcode from them other than the test projects,

Dang :slight_smile: … thanks for your reply!

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I found GitHub - hanskellner/Fusion360Image2Surface: Image2Surface Add-In for Autodesk Fusion 360 which allows me to convert a photo to a surface. I am not quite there yet but with some more fiddling I should be able to work out the kinks and do something similar to your valentines day project.

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As a point of reference, how long did it take to machine one of the sides for the finishing pass?
I was doing some experimenting in fusion and I came up with 2:45 hrs for a 100*120mm rose which seems excessive. I just don’t know just HOW excessive it is.
This is my first try at this with no optimization using a 1/32 TBN. This is for the finishing pass only.

I did this using a 1/4" ball nose for the roughing then a 1/16" tapered ball nose with an 8% stepover for the final finishing. The two took about 4 hours. More than 3 of that was the finishing toolpath. Did I mention that I hate sanding? :grinning_face: With the finishing pass using the TBN, there was pretty much no sanding.

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Thanks … looks like the time estimate I had wasn’t really out of line after all. Time to give this a go :slight_smile:

@Jens It really comes down to how much post-processing/sanding you are up for. When using a tbn with a .06" tip, an 8% stepover is only removing 5 thousandths of an inch each pass. It is very slow going.

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I just did a test run in particle board . The outcome was rather disappointing. While all there, you couldn’t tell what it was unless you knew beforehand. This is with raw particle board so I am wondering how you did the finishing on your rose in order to get such a well defined and clearly recognizable final product.
Of course it is quite possible that your rose was tweaked for more relief and what not whereas mine was just a picture converted to a solid 3D shape.

I tried three different finishes - wood sealer, walnut stain, varathane and things are not looking promising. I will see what it looks like when cured tomorrow morning. Next try will be with some solid wood but I have nothing fancy handy just some glued up fir (?) planks. Beyond that I can try to tweak the model or find something with a more appropriate range of brightnesses (for more relief)

Hi Jens,

I think a shape converted out of an photo might not give the best quality to experiment 3d carving with. I have used a few converted photos, but only to give me a relief on wich I could project a laser etch of the same photo on. The converters I used barely managed to give something to work with.

Now I know AI is getting better and better, but I don’t think they will ever convert a 3d relief out of a 2d photo and beat 2.5D-art that is designed to be crisp.

That said, Your relief is kinda usefull if you want a base to edit. It’s way more crisp than what I have managed to extract out of photo’s thus far.

Anyhooo, It might bean idea to download a STL and work with that and go the design your own art later. I don’t do a lot of 2.5D work, but if I need something, I’ll first look at this page to see if something is freely available.

A lot of these files are ment to be used on a 3D printer, so mostly useless, but there are some good 2.5D reliefs, if you take your time looking.

I wish you good carvings. Doing 2.5D is a lot of fun, if you can step over the time consuming part.

@Jens I have no experience with Fusion so I can’t say what is possible wrt to 3D modelling. @Spamming_Eddie is correct when he says that simply converting a 2D photo to a 3D model is often not very successful.
In the case of this vase, I started with an .stl file of the rose. I still needed to play with its base height and model height in VCarve. I also had to create the toolpaths keeping in mind that the rose was on a curved surface. VCarve can accommodate that. If Fusion cannot, despite any model that you can create or find, you will always have an issue there.
I’ve had some success using AI and some free conversion tools to create 3D models from scratch. You can see the one that I did of the fire breathing dragon here in the forum. Again, though, once that you have created the model, you will be restricted to what Fusion can do with it.

Like Eddie stated, getting a great 2.5D file from a picture without doing a lot of manual manipulation afterwards may not yield the best results.

There is a Blender add-on called True Depth that does a reasonable job. While Blender is free, the add-on is not (but it is cheap). Unless there’s a sentimental reason to use a picture, it might be better to just buy an STL. If you use Vectric, you have access to a large library of files, but they can only be used with Vectric products. Unfortunately, I don’t think Fusion has the same type of library.

@Jens I forgot to mention. Vectric’s site designandmake.com sells high quality models. You can download .stl files from there, as well as their proprietary file types.
If Fusion can work with .stl files, that may be a good way to go. Designandmake frequently has choices that include the basic model or the model in dish. That way, the relationship between the model and the dish is already set for you. Just a thought.

edit: I just read two net articles on importing .stl files into fusion. It doesn’t seem to be a difficult process.

Awesome - thanks Eddie!

I found an stl file on the site that @Spamming_Eddie recommended and will give that a try.
I can’t design my own (definitely not an artistic kinda guy) and it never occurred to me to compensate for the dished surface. That is way past my pay grade and I don’t think fusion can do that anyway.
I will see by tonight what an stl can do.