Lithopane advice needed

[myxpykalix]

It has been a few years since i made a lithopane and I went down to the furniture company to use artcam and one of the issues i ran into was when you input your picture and make an object of it the surfaces and faces are all bumpy (I assume from the pixels in the photograph).

I have no recollection of how i dealt with that last time but since i'm doing this one for a police officer and his child who has leukemia, i'd like to make sure it looks good.

I don't think running a smoothing pass is the answer as you lose detail also. As i'm writing i'm recalling some details...I might have done some manual smoothing in the modeling section(?)

Any suggestions on how to start out with a smoother picture? The picture is about 500k in size.

[Davo]

What about a slight Gaussian blur to the image - very minor

I use this technique to help the bitmap tracing come out more smoothly

Drastically helps pixelated low res images I come across

[myxpykalix]

Under gaussian blur what should i put the "square size"(a slider increases the number of pixels) and defaults at 3. What should that be?

[Davo]

Actually I'm not sure

I use gimp prior to using the photo and adjust it there

But the effect I go for is very subtle, zoomed in the pixel is no longer square but blended

[bleeth]

You need to start with a higher res photo.
Make your model the size of the litho and when setting size make resolution 2-3 million. Also helps to convert photo to greyscale before importing it.

[myxpykalix]

Dave and Davo...
both of those tips seem to have helped along with some manual sculpting and smoothing. After i cut it i'll post results. Thanks for taking the time to offer help.

[Brian Harnett]

I have made surprisingly good lithophanes with the shop bot image converter just reverse the default white and black settings,