How do various design methods affect the carving method?

[eepers]

Specifically, I know if I import an image I'll get something that is carved in passes and will most likely need touching up and sanding to be smooth and polished looking. I know if I use a font, or most line tools the router will be moving along the path and will most likely produce a better quality line.

What I'm not sure about is when people are creating designs in vector based programs, does it still carve the piece in a boatload of passes across the board, producing the roughness of a design created from an image heightmap? Or does it somehow use those vector based lines to move the workpiece around making smoother passes as it traces around the lines of the design?

Basically, is there any advantage to using vector based source art as opposed to image based source art, assuming you have the image quality and resolution to produce a high quality heightmap?

Love to have info on that, thanks so much in advance.

[Jon Jantz]

Eepers, at this point the Carvewright Designer program will only bring in bitmap images from other graphics programs. So even if you design a vector image in Coreldraw or Illustrator, you will have to turn it into a bitmap before bringing it in Designer.

As far as the depth maps having visible steps when carving on the machine, I have noticed very little of this on the images I've created in Coreldraw. You can see them in the Designer program, but on the actual carving they are not visible. I have at times put a little bit of a blur on my images in Photopaint in order to hide some of the steps.

Hope I didn't muddle the issue even more for you! LOL

[eepers]

That's excellent to hear! My intended workflow once I get one of these was to work in a 3D package, render a heightmap from that (by projecting a gradient texture onto the object from the side) and bring the image into the Designer software.

I thought perhaps some of these vector files were giving better results than an image in BMP format or something.