Turn a Flat Image Into a 3d Relief for CNC

so i've been working on these uh jewelry box designs these two are african mahogany this one is maple this one is spanish cedar and i've been carving these on my cnc machine the lid of it is a two-sided carve so basically i hollow out this side and then i flip it over and i carve the leaf on the top with this uh 3d image of the wasp a couple of designs i'm working with right now this one is a paper wasp and then these are all the same design it's a scarab beetle but what i want to talk about today is how i generated these 3d images these shallow reliefs of the insects from photographs so first let me show you this piece of software that i've been playing with this is called zbrush and it basically gives you a virtual ball of clay to play with and use various brushes to add or subtract material or push things around or smooth it out and it's a lot of fun to play with there is a free version of it so if you're interested i highly recommend you go download it i'm using the kind of intermediate paid version which cost about two hundred dollars i find it it's very worth it um i'm not going to do an in-depth tutorial on how to use zbrush because there's a lot of good tutorials out there and actually i'm just pretty new to it i'm not that good at it yet but that's kind of the point is that i want to show you that even someone like me who's pretty new to digital sculpting can generate some high quality designs from photographs and i'm going to show you a technique that's kind of a cheats kind of a little head start that'll help you specifically with doing shallow reliefs like you would be using for c and obviously i'm just playing around here i just wanted to give you an idea of what the software looks like but for our example we're going to do a sculpture based on this image of a human heart and i just pulled this image off of google images and we're going to take this and we're going to bring it into fusion 360 which is the other piece of software that i use for a lot of my work if you're not familiar with fusion it also has a free version you can download and it's a very powerful piece of software i use it for generating blueprints animations doing my design work and for generating my g-code for all of my cnc as well so the first thing i'm going to do is select insert canvas and i'm going to find the image of the heart that i pulled off of google images and we're going to select a plane to put it on and then we're going to just scale it to size by selecting it selecting calibrate choosing two points and then setting what we want that distance to be then i'm going to choose create sketch i'm going to choose the same plane that the heart is on and then i'm just going to take the spline tool and start tracing the heart if some of your points don't land exactly right don't worry about it just keep moving and you'll be able to come back at the end and make whatever adjustments you need to make i know that i'm rolling through this kind of quickly and if you've never played with either fusion 360 or zbrush this tutorial might seem kind of overwhelming but just keep in mind that we're only going to use the very most basic functions of both pieces of software so if you're not sure what i'm talking about here you might want to just go watch a couple of intro tutorials and it won't take you long at all to get to the point where all of this seems really simple just going to catch these negative spaces as well and then i'm going to look around and find any points that are a little off base and just grab them and move them until the spline looks the way i want it to look when i'm happy with everything i'm just going to hit finish sketch select that surface and then hit q for extrude and pull it up just a little bit and now you'll see i've got kind of this flat wafer in the shape of the heart so the next thing i'm going to do is create another sketch on that surface and then i'm just going to start defining some of these internal structures i'm just focused on the large forms right now i'm not going to worry about all the little veins and different surface textures we just want to kind of define the major components of the form we're going to do [Music] when we're done with that we can hit finish sketch and then select each of these faces individually and extrude them upwards to varying heights you can just hit q which is the hotkey for extrude and then pull it up slightly i usually like to start with whatever the tallest structure is going to be and then work my way down from there the actual heights that we pull these two is a little bit arbitrary but i'm just trying to keep it pretty thin so now we've got this solid body and the shape of our heart the general features kind of drawn out on it but for the next step we're going to need to turn this into a mesh so we're going to go to save as stl hit ok give it a name and then hit save and now we go back into zbrush go to the tools tab select import and find the stl file that we just exported and you'll see now instead of a ball of clay we've got this piece of clay in the shape of the heart that we're trying to sculpt now a mesh body is really just a surface made out of a bunch of polygons and vertices and as you can see when we look at the topology here fusion has generated some kind of strange geometry that's not really going to work well for sculpting the first thing i'm going to do is turn off symmetry because this is not a symmetrical sculpture and then i'm going to use the z remesher tool and what this is going to do is create a new topology that has evenly spaced vertices all over the surface and now if i hit the divide button the number of vertices is going to multiply making an even denser mesh and this is going to allow for greater detail when we start sculpting keep in mind that when you're using zbrush all you're really doing is pushing and pulling these points around none of your brushes are going to actually add any new vertices or polygons from this point forward 90 percent of the work that i'm gonna do is with one tool which is the clay buildup tool and all i'm doing is sweeping back and forth across the surface building up volume and shape i'm not really worried about texture at this point i'm just adding depth to my object if at any point you feel like you need to smooth out the surface you can just hold down the shift key and whatever tool you're using will turn into a smoothing tool it's good to not be too heavy-handed with this technique though because you can lose a lot of detail instead it's good to just reduce the size of your brush and use a lighter touch to slowly refine the surface just to show you my setup i'm working on a tablet with a touch screen and on my computer monitor i have an image of the heart pulled up for reference using a tablet like this is a lot easier than using a mouse but it's not completely necessary the scarab beetle that i showed at the beginning of this video i did before i got my tablet and it was entirely done with just an ordinary mouse so i'm pretty happy with how this is starting to look now but if i rotate this to the side i can show you that there's still these awkward kind of flat edges that i need to do something about so for the next step i'm going to use the clay buildup tool again but i'm going to switch it into a subtractive mode and i'm going to use it to just kind of round these corners over and blend it in as i mentioned in the beginning of this video this isn't any kind of comprehensive introduction to zbrush what i really wanted to show you is how you can use fusion in concert with zbrush to give yourself a really good head start into sculpting particularly when you're trying to do shallow reliefs if i had attempted to do this sculpture and zbrush from the ground up just looking at an image of a heart it would have been hours of frustration and i'm not sure that i ever would have gotten into a place where i was happy with it as a final touch i'm just using the standard brush to add some veins i'm not going to go too detail heavy in the sculpture because in the end it's going to be a relatively small carving in wood and a lot of the detail will be lost anyway [Music] well i'm going to call this finished it's not perfect but at the scale that i'm going to be carving this out of wood any more refinement is going to lead to diminishing returns so the next thing i'm going to do is use the decimation master to reduce the number of polygons just to make this into a smaller file that'll be a little bit easier to deal with after that finishes calculating we can go to the 3d print hub and update our size ratios just by selecting the appropriate units and then we're going to export our stl to get it ready for carving now we're back in fusion where i've opened the model of my blank jewelry box and all we're going to do is import the heart sculpture that we did and drag it into position and scale it to the size we like [Music] the manufacturing tab is beyond the scope of this video but because i've already done this several times with other designs all i really need to do is let fusion recalculate the tool paths that i've already set up if you're brand new to the concept of 3d modeling this video might have seemed like a lot but if you've been toying around with cnc or maybe 3d printing this technique of using cad software to create a general form and then zbrush or some other sculpting software to do your fine sculpting can really open up a new world and make digital sculpting a lot less intimidating so i've got this blank here for the top of my jewelry box that i carved out of african mahogany i carved this side uh from the bottom and now i'm going to flip it over and stick it on this fixture i made so we can carve the design into the top of the box [Music] [Music] do you

Channel: Chemical 14

Views: 17,747

Keywords: cnc, zbrush, sculpture, howto, diy, digital, fusion, fusion360, relief, 3d, design

Id: dXabKAFmbQI

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021