Engraving a picture (3D) - possible?

[gottswinter]

Hi!

i want to engrave a die for engraving a coin. The coin profile (or call it relief) is available as a 2d black-white picture, where the grey values correspond to a certain depth of engraving.

I have done very little engraving in fusion until now, however, all this was engraving text or vectored images.

Now i would like the mill to kind of "raster" the profile line by line. Is this possible in fusion? I have been searching for a while, yet found nothing so far. How would i do this?

best regards,

Andy

[RandyKopf · Accepted solution]

@gottswinter

I'll message you what I found that works... and does not work...

There is a post that a user on here did a Height field script that worked fairly well. It's where the whites and blacks are interpreted into heights. Then a surface is made from that. You can then trim the surface...

EDIT I found the post... It's pretty cool...

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/api-and-scripts/image-2-surface-script-for-fusion-360/m-p/6229685#M13...

[gottswinter]

@Anonymous

Awesome! I will try that out!

regards,

andy

[George-Roberts]

I developed an external application for exactly this (well, the idea was to create a program to tattoo black and white images with a CNC mill, finished the software, still looking for someone to let me replace the spindle with a tattoo gun :D) ... I'll look at how it could be put into a script and share if I can get it working

[RandyKopf]

That sounds pretty cool. Now that Fusion 360 is about to get 5 Axis simultaneous you will need to update that program to scan a body part and apply that tattoo! Dang head is spinning thinking of the math 🙂

[HughesTooling]

There is a free program ZSurf the converts bitmaps to iges files. Take a look at this thread.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/image-relief-any-way-to-create-one-in-fusion3...

Mark

[RandyKopf]

@HughesTooling

Thanks Mark I'll check that one out... the posts in that link show people like ZSurf. And it looks to integrate well.

I'm always looking for a better or complimentary solution for bitmap to surface modeling. I've had some success with Rhino Height field conversion. And in ZBrush you can use Alpha layers but then we digress from a precision model to mesh. And I have Deskproto that does quite a bit with easy Lithophanes support from bitmap.

[HughesTooling]

HI Randy

I think the trick with Zsurf is to make sure there's a good boarder around the bitmap so you can trim it and join to a surface\body in Fusion as post #11 suggests in the linked thread. I haven't used Zsurf for a long time but looking at the tray in the other thread it seems to work quite well. I know there are a few programs out there that work directly of the bitmap to generate the Z heights but i don't know if that's something HSM would be interested in adding.

Mark

[George-Roberts]

Yeahh!!!! I'd probably chop my arm off on the first try though 😞

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the answer! Got the engraving modeled and will print tomorrow!