coin carve?

[revwarguy]

I am in the process of building a cnc router. I plan to use Mach3 to drive it.

However, one of the immediate things I need to do is to reproduce a coin in foam on an expanded scale, say 1 foot or so across.

What is the best way to go about this? So far, I have seen:

A. get a small probe and scan the surface of the coin, forming a point cloud and getting a relief map from that.

B. getting a good image and tracing a 2d outline and use vcarve or something like it.

My questions are:

1. Has anyone done this - if so, could you tell me the exact steps and software used? Remember, I am a newby at this.

2. Would would you consider to be the best (in terms of easy to learn and cheap as prime drivers, but with good results) software combination to do this?

3. If anyone has done this, could you share some pictures with me?

TIA,

Revwarguy