Using a Bump map to add texture to a machined plate

[Journeyman13]

hi guys I have been using Fusion 360 for a while now and I am looking to do a highly textured plate for a project, like a leather pattern onto a mold for plastic parts. I used to use 3DSMAX a lot, so the way I am thinking of doing it is applying a old bumb, or normals map I have, to the model in some way to create the geometry for a CNC mill to cut, is this a possible solution to put organic textures onto a part? 

here is a texture to play with.

thanks for any help

[TrippyLighting]

This is only possible for renderings.

There is no displacement mapping that would allow you to modify the actual 3D geometry of a surface with a high level of detail

[Journeyman13]

Then is there another way to introduce such complex organic geometry outside of imputing it all in by hand?

[TrippyLighting]

That depends on the level of detail you are expecting to see in the surface. In my experience displacement mapping requires a lot of polygons and fusion 360 cannot really handle that many at the moment. There is a Fusion 30 script that modifies a T-Spline mesh based on an image but I personally would create the displaced mesh outside of Fusion 360 with Blender as it is much more responsive. then I'd import the surface into Fusion 360.

Then you have two choices

1. you can import the displaced mesh and convert it into a T-Spline.

2. you an import the mesh and directly convert it into a BRep. In order for that to work the Mesh would have to have less than 10000 polygons.

You need to experiment with that and see if that would work for your application. Could you post a bigger image than that post stamp size picture ?

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Journeyman13

Can you post the full size image....I have an idea but probably wont have anything to show until later this weekend...

[Journeyman13]

this is as big as i have

[jcoubrough]

First post here, and I decided to bump this (excuse the pun).

I'm brand new to fusion 360 and I'm trying to get an overview of a potential workflow for some ideas that I intend to try with CNC.

And I'm curious about how to achieve some nice surface textures.

Not only leather and organic patterns like @Journeyman13 mentioned, but also things like stippling and knurling type of effects.

I understand the process of converting a displacement map to polygons in Blender or similar, but I think the type of detail I'm thinking of would be over the polygon limit.

Can anybody shed any more light about how this might be achieved in f360 (now or in the potential future), or how it is achieved in other software or manufacturing processes?

Even some search terms for clues and inspiration would be super useful to me right now, because my googling is not getting me far 🙂

Thanks

[queenpookie]

Wait so can someone explain to me how they milled this detail in the video without using normal/bump maps? It sure looks to me like you can do this with Fusion 360.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaASmHtmVUw

They import a surface that appears to have normal map on it, then when it';s milled the fine details are there from the map right???

[TrippyLighting]

They did not use bump maps at all!

The face was scanned with a NextEngine laser scanner, which creates a triangulated mesh surface.

Then a softwarer (I assume that goes with the scanner) is used to clean up the mesh.
Then another part of that software does a very nice job of creating (NURBS ? ) surface patches form the mesh.

That is imported into Fusion 360 and stitched into a cohesive surface in the Patch environment in Fusion 360.

Then some standard Fusion 360 modeling and the thing is a solid body that then is machined on the CNC mill.

Bump and normal mapping are pure GC illusionist tricks that do not modify a surface. What you are talking about would be displacement mapping and that process has nothing to do with what's shown in the video.

[queenpookie]

I'm confused as the nurbs surface did not appear to have splines for the eyebrow details. Was the wireframe in the video just a loose representation of the actual surface geometry?

[TrippyLighting]

Possibly. Hard to say without having the actual data available.

you can ask that in the comment section no YouTube.

One thing  I can tell you for sure is that Fusin 360 does not allow surface modifications by means of displacement mapping.

[PhilProcarioJr]

@queenpookie

The face model did have the eyebrow data in it look closely at the 1:40 second mark.

Nurbs data is a set of patches and doesn't show surface detail like polygon meshes do. You can have a huge amount of surface detail in a single patch where as you can't have any surface detail in a polygon.

Once you use an external app to generate the displacement data and convert that to mesh data depending on the polygon limit you may have to split the mesh up into pieces and reassemble them like I did in the what's possible with T-Splines thread. Anything is possible just depends on how much work your willing to put into it and how powerful your computer is.

But @TrippyLighting is correct your not going to achieve all of this with just Fusion by itself. I should know since I do this kind of work everyday...all day...

[mcramblet]

This image shows an example of a comfortable amount of surface detail that I've been able to achieve with T-Splines and traditional CAD:

Not bad for a 100% CAD workflow. But for something like this:

For this level of detail, a non-traditional approach is needed. These were created in Geomagic Freeform, then surfaced to bring into CAD, and completed there. The small surface patches and the corresponding point structure of the patches can be seen here:

Crazy surface detail like this is best done outside of CAD, then brought in to complete manufacturing.

[queenpookie]

WOW that is an eye opener. Thanks for the replies. I was wondering, I currently use Zbrush for a lot of my organic modelling. Is anyone here aware of a workflow to bring in Zbrush models with that kind of detail, like Freeform?

[mcramblet]

I've played around with ZBrush with both Rhino (& T-Splines) and in Fusion 360. I've had good luck with models going back and forth, but mostly for shapes and models without a high level of surface detail. It's a difficult balancing act between maintain detail and having a file that is small enough to still open and function in a CAD application. Files with several million points aren't a problem for ZBrush, but trying to work with a surfaced CAD file with that many surface points and everything comes to a standstill.

I've seen a couple of people having fairly good luck with essentially resurfacing a mesh with T-Spline patches, in a similar fashion that one would resurface a sculpt in ZBrush. I've played around with this a little bit, but it takes time and patience, which I had neither of, at the time. Bridging the gap between CAD and other forms of 3D modeling is somewhat like the Holy Grail. A lot of people are looking for it, some claim to have found it, but the proof is sketchy. Freeform has been about the closest thing that I've discovered, but even then it's not an easy solution, nor can I even dream to afford it.

[Jim.curry]

You would need a displacement map, not a bump map. A displacement map can be applied to the actual object mesh, and deforms it in order to make textures more lifelike.

Hope this helps,

Foodrelatedname

[TrippyLighting]

Understood. That is not available in Fusion 360. If you've read some of the earlier posts in this thread it is clear that the actual generation of a displaced mesh has to happen on another software.

Also, traditionally displacement mapping is done on pylon meshes, not on CAD models, which are represented by NURBS surfaces, which are mathematically much more complex. T-Splines could theoretically bridge the gap somewhat, but for high levels of detail they are not performant enough (in Fusion 360).

[eightman]

this post is a little old but found it first when trying to make displacement map.

I found a usefull add-in that do the job:
Fusion360Image2Surface

I managed to make this light cap rather quickly with it

[marcel-gabriel]

This is an awsome Add-In, I just tried it out.
But how where you able to apply it to an already existing face (like the curved circle in your example)?

I would love to add random bumps to a sphere in this way.

[TrippyLighting]

That addin works mostly on flat(tish) surfaces.

I usually use Blender and  procedural textures that are used to displace quad polygons.

So if you want to end up with a complete sphere with a texture on it you'd create a subdivided  sphere in Blnder and then use the technique I described.

The resulting quad mesh you would export into a .obj and that you'd convert into a T-Spline in Fusion 360.