carveco
zbrush
I’m also trying to do this and all I’ve found is to use fusion 360, blender, inscape or Aspire. I’d like to see other responses too :smile:


I recall seeing an old (likely outdated, it was 10+ years ago made and didnt mention CNC) of
 them doing a “bas relief” where they could trace out a character/object from an image in GIMP or Photoshop,
then use greys to make a “height map” then some how convert that into an STL file. Seemed like it was on the
 right track for what I wanted, but was missing a lot of information.


I tried the Bas-Relief feature in ZBrush when it came out last year. I didn’t have any luck with it, especially the kind of quality
 of STL’s you have above. Also, with the feature being new there were very few tutorials. Along with the fact that since then
ZBrush has been acquired and is becoming a subscription.

There are tools in Blender also, height maps, etc., but that’s another learning curve for me. Not sure I need all that?

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ways to do this also. So far, Aspire is the only tool which I’ve used to create some of my own 3D results with.


Getting a bit closer I think, came across this

https://triaxes.com/articles/manual-depth-map-creation/ 196

It’s a tutorial on how to manually create depth maps of 2d images. Ignore the last bit about the animation part.
 It appears this is one way of creating the greyscale bitmap images. I believe there is a variety of software out
 there in which you can then import these greyscale bitmaps, to make into an STL file. I’ll have to test it out - but
 it should give a result similar to the samples I posted in the original post. Might be a bit tedious to make,
 but it appears thats one way to make them.

Edit: Heres a more updated version of essentially the same thing, in video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0RuWf-J1k 175