This is a picture of a friend from her wedding day. She is from Pakistan although now a US citizen.

Material is 1/2" thick Corian 9" x 12.9". I pocketed out the area where the image sits to 1/4" thick before running the PhotoVCarve code. This left a nice frame for me to clamp down and lends rigidity to the finished piece.
- Roughing pass: 1/8" ball end mill set .080" below the floor of the 1/4" deep pocket I made (per Tony's tutorial). Stepover was 50%, spindle speed 7500rpm, feedrate of 100ipm. Took about 45minutes. Max carving depth was .100".
- Finish pass: 3/64" ball end mill set .100" below the floor of the 1/4" deep pocket (again per Tony's tutorial). Stepover was 10%, spindle speed 7500rpm, feedrate 150ipm. Took almost 11 hours.

Tony, the only feature I could see adding to this software is the ability to DNC directly from the software. I'm guessing that would up the cost too much to be worthwhile though.

This is a great program. Easy to use and the results speak for themselves. Very cool. :)

Capris
Verry nice job
Steve

I did a couple more in the past month and have posted images in a gallery. Each picture will keep enlarging with each click until it reaches it's largest size.

http://mc-machine.com/crokes_pics/main.php?g2_itemId=14

The first album is the litho in my first post.

The second album is a photo of my aunt taken in 1951 juxtaposed with a photo of my grandfather from the 1930s.

The third album is my neighbor's parents taken in the 1940s.

Hi Capris,

Fantastic Lithophanes and thanks for posting the excellent photo's detailing the complete process. You really have this down to a fine art and I'm sure your friends and family love the results - these things really are addictive and become family Heirlooms that will last for generations.

We do have some enhancement ideas for PhotoVCarve and will hopefully get time to incorporate these later in the year. For example, it would be good to have a dedicated Lithophane interface - currently really setup for the Groove machining process.

Would you mind if we used some of your pictures on the Vectric web site?

To answer the DNC question - Drip feeding all the various CNC machine controllers is quite a challenge and we prefer to let the other guys take care of this. We can drive machines directly through a Printer driver - the Roland and Gravograph - New Hermes machines use this approach.

Thanks again,

Tony

Tony, feel free to use any image you deem acceptable. I just finished another for a friend and added it to that gallery I linked previously so there should now be four albums. Another should be done by the end of the week. These are just snapshots that don't do the pieces justice. The "pop" factor when viewed for the first time is not able to be conveyed with my camera.

I need a machine with more travel as I'd like to try some larger pieces. :D Just imagine being able to replace a window in a house. If someone doesn't like the view out a window, they could put one of these up showing majestic mountains or a serene scene. :)

A dedicated litho interface would be neat. Being able to set the tools to the top surface and specify a depth from zero would be more conventional than the current method. Or set the tools to the table and specify min/max material thickness of the finished piece.

On the last couple, I've deviated slightly from your tutorial by increasing cutting depth to .120" and touching the rougher tool -.060" and the finish tool -.080" (compared to -.080" & -.100"). The idea behind this is to get more contrast from light to dark in the finished piece.

Thanks again for this software. It's very satisfying to get such spectacular results with so little skill on my part.

Really impressed with the Lithophanes Caprirs, I'd like to see the gallery you posted, but it's asking for a password

Really impressed with the Lithophanes Caprirs, I'd like to see the gallery you posted, but it's asking for a password


Yeah me as well, lemme in, lemme in, I wanna see.

Cheers M

Sorry about that. Moved things around in the past two years. Try this one.

http://mc-machine.com/mcm_gallery/v/MC-Machine-Dash-Plates/PhotoVCarve/