going from rhino to designer. (3d guys please assist)

[betacrash]

I am slowly entering the world of 3d design to get some of my ideas into the CC. What I am currently doing is making a design in sketchup and then exporting it as a .3DS and importing it into artcam. I then save the relief (BMP or TIF) then import it into designer. First, what is the official name of those grayscale images (like the relief images produced by artcam and the scan probe software) Its kind of hard to research something when you dont know the name. Second, when I import the "relief" image from Artcam into designer, I get a lot of stair stepping and Im sure its due to the file that artcam is creating. Does anyone know if Rhino3D is able to export this type of file? Im starting to do some design in Rhino and it would sure be nice to do everything at once. Thanks -shawn

[JOHNB]

grayscale png....go from bmp. to png., then into designer.

[deemon328]

I think the term you're looking for is height map. If you use a higher resolution like 300dpi instead of 72dpi and/or create a larger image, you'll get a more even heightmap distribution.

For example, think of a square pyramid. There are 256 shades of grey on the height map. If each color is a pixel, you'll need an image that's 512 x 512 pixels to display every shade.


I can't comment on Rhino 3D, but I've had successful results importing from strata 3d to photoshop, then to designer.

Good luck!

[gmalanoski]

Shawn,

I would also make sure your resolution is set just perfect. I believe I read somewhere that the CW software uses 128dpi when importing images. Maybe someone else can verify this 100%? If so, I believe that would be the optimum export format to ensure a true reproduction.

I have also had good results exporting directly to png files and then importing them into the designer. The file type shouldn't matter so long as you stay with lossless types as deemon328 suggested.

HTH,

Greg

[betacrash]

Strata3d looks really cool. How does it compare with other 3D packages? I have just been using Rhino since I saw a couple of tutorials done by other CNC workers and it seemed like a good choice. What do you do to your images in photoshop? thanks -shawn

[deemon328]

I'm no 3D software expert, so comparing and contrasting different packages won't get far. I can tell you what I really like about the Strata 3D/Photoshop CS3 combo.

In Strata 3d, you create your model. You can then render to layers and save as a photoshop file. The advantage is that the layer structure is preserved, and one of the layers that you can render is a height map. So, I"ll load up Photoshop and just use the height map layer and export it to PNG. So far, that's the cleanest way I've come up with to get an accurate heightmap import. I'm an extreme novice in Strata 3D, so I don't know if there's a way to render only the heightmap and export directly to PNG. It wasn't obvious to me, so I took the extra Photoshop steps.

[twehr]

I do not use Strata 3D, but looked at their info in response to these posts.

I noticed that they have various plug-ins for Photoshop. So it may be possible to do everything you are talking about directly in Photoshop instead of working in Strata and moving it to PS before going to Designer. If they would do the same thing, the prices are reasonable (assuming you already own PS).

If anyone knows whether (or which) Strata plug-ins for PS would also produce the height maps, I would be interested in knowing about it.