Non-Traditional Business Card Holder!

[SevenCubed]

Howdy, folks! Long time no write, I know... I've been busy with a new company I've started, offering 3D Printing. I STILL get Carvewright projects in whenever I can, though, evidenced by my latest piece here, entitled "I'm Still Fine". I came up with the idea of it; something to promote my wife's comics at conventions and whatnot. She did the initial concept, I modeled everything in 3DS MAX, carved it, and Kelli did all the painting and finish. We're both thrilled to peaches about how it came out! Main problem is that folks kept commenting on the carving and didn't know where her business cards were. =)

[Tom Spaulding]

Wow very cool design!

Did you use the STL importer or grayscale to import the model?

-Tom

[SevenCubed]

I jus' rendered the depth from MAX and Photoshopped it a bit. The STL importer feels like a good thing for making big models and etc., but for relief carvings, it still feels like it makes more sense to render a Z-Buffer and Photoshop it up.

[James RS]

Great job, I like the paint job how did you go about the heightmap in Max?

[SevenCubed]

It's pretty simple! I should probably write a tutorial for folks... Here's the short version:
When you go to render, there's a "Render Elements" section of your Render dialogue. Press the "Add" button, and add "Z Depth". Then scrub down to your options there, and "Z Min" is where the depth starts, and "Z Max" is where the depth stops! Easy peasy. When you set up a camera, you can make the "environment ranges" visible, so you'll have a great way of seeing what's inside your depth calculations and what ain't.

Let me know if you have any trouble with the process! It's actually a great way to render a scene in MAX directly into something the CarveWright can handle.