2d image to emboss / bas relief 3d

Perfect, thanks Ian I think I'm going to give it a try.

I've been playing around with it for a little while, can't get a clean stl out of it but that's in between phone calls and emails.  I may need to read the instructions to see what I'm doing wrong.  This would be pretty cool though should it work.

Great to hear this. Open source?

Here is my first try with the software.  I made the base layer .3 so it would be 1 layer, and the mesh is maybe 1.5mm.  I would make it a little thicker next time.  Also I would reduce contrast within the face a little more.  There is a dark shadow along the side of her nose which makes that line deeper than it should be.  I painted out any specular highlights, like in the eyes, and some glare on the lips.  I figured those would get rendered as spikes and look odd.

Within the software I applied a fairly aggressive vignette to tone down the highlights from the beads in her hair.

Printed at .1mm.  Not enough solid layers, or enough fill so there are a few gaps on the surface.  Once I get a print that I like, I'll give it a run through the Presto Print Finisher (tm).

BTW, this is the kind of thing that can buy you more time on the printer without eye rolling, or grumbling about chores that need to be done.

Something else I think would be cool is making a 2 tone or 3 tone version so that each shade will get rendered at a specific height.  Then change filament colors at each "plateau".

You could use something like the Obamicon generator http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/ and replace each of the colors with a particular shade of gray.

I'm very interested in this, and I'm in the beta test group and I was able to get a couple to work.  But this weekend when I went back in to try it some more I was having a huge problem with the size of the STL file and even when I got it to read into replicatorG for orientation it wouldn't slice.  I'm assuming it was from the size of the STL anyway because the smaller one would slice.  I didn't get as much time because my whole house has a cold so I was taking care of sick kids all weekend but I'm extremely excited about the possibilities from this.  All mine so far are very small prints to test things out so I didn't post results yet. 

Can you screenshot your settings from the setup window so I can try to duplicate the results.

There is a 150mm limit on output size from the program, correct?  Then you scale up in something else?

I was trying to trick it into higher resolution then scale it down for the printer and get more detail.  Maybe that was part of my problem with the size.  I had also thought about pre treating the image in photoshop and applying the vignette there so I had more control, and even artificially raising the nose a bit more with lighting to get an even more realistic effect.  That was one of the suggestions I was going to send Owen.

1. Move the crop first in line before contrast / brightness so you can see how it's affecting your cropped image
2. Add a simple lighten darken brush for more control over the output inside the software itself

I have a few other things but I want to sit down and see if I can find it before I make a suggestion just in case it's already there and I didn't miss it.