Lithopane in Aspire

[tlempicke]

I have Aspire 3.5. It clearly says in the sales literature that I can do lithopanes from that software. The only tutorials I can find talk about Photo V Carve.

Can someone get me started in the right direction?

[jerry_stanek]

This link should give you an idea on how to do them

http://www.vectric.com/forum/viewtop...=litho#p112658

[Brady Watson]

Can someone get me started in the right direction?

Make sure the subject is clear, sharp and in focus. "Cook" your photo by reducing it's bit depth and making it grayscale.

Create a new model in Aspire @ 7x resolution with an XY size no larger than say 1" greater than the photo size in any direction.

Using your 'cooked' photo, Model->Create Component from Selected Bitmap

This will create a heightfield from the photo you select, with white being highest and black being lowest in depth. You can reverse this proportion if you make your grayscale image negative in your photo editing software.

When complete, you can machine like any other 3D part. You'll probably use a 1/32 to 1/16" ball end mill, unless doing a very large part.

-B

[tmerrill]

Tom,

There is a dedicated Aspire tutorial included with the tutorials on your Aspire DVD. Picture should help you find it.

Tim

[Brian Harnett]

The shop bot file converter will do lithphanes and works well these lamps I did years ago with it, the material is 1/4 high density polyethylene using a 1/16 ballnose bit.

I think I had the White setting a .125 and the black at 0

[phil_o]

Brady, can you expand a bit on ""Cook" your photo by reducing it's bit depth". I don't understand what you mean by "reducing it's bit depth."

Thanks,

Phil

[myxpykalix]

Brian,
I never would have thought of making a lithopane into a lampshade like that...very cool idea

[Brady Watson]

Brian - pretty slick! - thanks for the reminder...a few of us were fooling with that sort of thing early on, but I don't think I saw anyone make a litho with it - Bravo! Even stuff like PhotoVCarve using ONLY SB3. Ah...the days of TypeSetter & DOS... Thank God they are over!

Phil,
It's been a while since I have done a lithopane (it has to be like 8yrs+), but if my memory serves me correctly, most pics will come in around 16 million colors (24bit). You want to reduce the color depth down to like 256 colors (8bit)...which incidentally is the number of 'colors' I get when I convert a 16 million color photo to grayscale - 256 shades of gray (incl. black & white).

You are only going a depth of maybe 1/32 to 3/16" max on most lithos. So...let's say we max out @ 0.1" depth on our litho. We need to make the 100% white depth = 0.1" and 100% black depth = 0. If we divide 0.1 by 16 million, we wind up with color depth differences so small that the machine would not be able to resolve them...plus the software won't do it anyway (ArtCAM, Aspire or PVC - they all reduce colors for this) - So grayscale would be a max of 256 colors, and that is a much more reasonable denominator than 16 million for these little moves.

You can do a real quick color reduction by typing mspaint into the Start->Run dialog and run it. Open up the pic in question, then alt+f, a to save as - Hit the drop down in files of type and look...there are entries to save out your pic as 3 different color depths in BMP format. Of course you can do this in PhotoShop, PSP, Gimp etc.

-B

[Brian Harnett]

Just to clarify things the newer versions of shop bot operating software have the image converter

Just go to file/ Conversions, click file type, select bmp,jpg navigate to the image you want and it will import in grayscale.

I will edit a picture if it has a bright reflection in a small area and dull it down like light flash from earrings.

[Brady Watson]

Yep...the older versions (DOS) had them too. In fact, they are the same utilities under FC with a few more functions added.

-B