Has anyone converted a photo face to a carving

[carlcath]

I am trying to convert a face from a photo to a carving. I have Photoshop and Illustrator. The skin comes out with to many peaks and dips. The light source often makes the cheeks and nose light when they need to be dark for the pattern. Changing light to dark as in a negative does not solve the problem as the teeth need to stay lighter colored than say the lips. I tried drawing a face using gradients for a smooth face but adding eyes, nose, ears, lips, ect with a gradient for each for smooothness became an impossible task. Has anyone else tried? Any success?
Carl

[jcorder]

Hello,

It needs to have a high resolution and save it with the lowest amount of compression you can. The higher the compression, the more junk you will have. Convert it to grey scale and export it as a PNG file. Those steps will help clean it up a lot.

[James RS]

Do a search on lithopanes, there are few different tips

[HighTechOkie]

One thing I can suggest is using Gaussian blur to smooth out the face. Then you can work on features and detail. Most of which will need the greyscale changed to represent height. To create a 3D face requires a significant amount of time. The photo serves as a rough outline to draw/sculpt a 3D face. The greyscale information from the photo is basically useless. Many professionals doing 3D modeling take 1.5+ days to create a good 3D face and that is using high end 3D modeling software. There just is no easy way to get a quality 3D face from a photo.

Rob

[jpaluck]

2nd rob on that one... would be impossible in a graphics program..definitly need a 3d program..and yep it takes awhile to get it right

John

[JVallario]

My only attempt at carving a photo face I did with photoshop. I recolored the areas in photoshop using a high gloss gold background when viewing the pattern in the carvewright software to show the high spots and tilting the patttern. The textures are a free download at (http://www.carvebuddy.com/free_stuff.html). It took a lot of work the first time - going back and forth between the 2 softwares but I think next time will be faster (I have a slowwwww learning curve):D

Still had to sand a bit - might have done some more as well.

Attached is what I acheived - would have been better with centerline text but I didn't have it at the time.

[mtylerfl]

Hello John,

I would say you did an excellent job on the photo. It can be challenging to get a photo to carve well on wood, and what you did looks as good as any I have seen. Great work. The only way it could get better is to do a 2.5D model, which takes time and $$.

[luckettg]

2nd rob on that one... would be impossible in a graphics program..definitly need a 3d program..and yep it takes awhile to get it right

John
How would the 3d file get imported into Designer then? I have both SketchUp and Rhinoceros for 3D work. I have been importing raster files only into Designer, such as PNG or BMP.
Thanks.:)

[HighTechOkie]

The 3D file does not load in Designer. You have to export a height map from the 3d modeling software. 3D modeling software offers more tools and the ability to work in 3d to create a realistic model.

Rob

[jpaluck]

Greg

If you can use rhino well you can make some pretty cool stuff with it...I had the demo version it works very good for making patterns. But what rob said is right once you make the model you have to to convert it to a heightmap. Blender is free and I saw a tutorial on the forum here about creating a heightmap render with blender. I personaly hated the interface. So you could model in rhino export the file from Rhino and import into blender for the heightmap.

John