That is AMAZING.. I have been using Cura solidly for 12 months and didn't know that...
I am going to have a play.. But based on my first tests, this looks perfect.
One thing jumps out immediatly is the 'base'.. My "background" is white.. Yet I get a bottom to the print which could have to be trimmed off... Is there a way to make Cura treat a white background as "nothing"?
Jon
Edit: I guess I could just use the "cut off the bottom" feature to sink it into the bed.
Edited by Guest
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tommyph1208 55
So... The very simplest approach is to simply drag your image file into cura... (it will accept .bmp, .jpg, .png and possibly more)
Cura will generate a 3d model for you where a grescale version of the image is used as a heightmap... You have a few options, like deciding which tone, dark or light, should be low and high points, some options for how large the model will be, and if it will have a base or not.
the import also has two simple smoothing filters you can apply.
Now, depending on your source material, this may or may not be a sufficient approach... I tried it a bit, and found that with an image with a lot of detail (many different greyscale values cluttered about), you get a lot of "hills" and "valleys" in your print, which results in a lot of travel, retraction, stringing, etc. generally things you would want to avoid.
I found that you get the best results, if you pre process your image a bit, using a photo editing tool like eg. photoshop... In there you can do a lot of smart filtering, and if you can eg. reduce the image to 3-5 greyscale values (or even hard black/white), you'll get a much better result.
Another approach is, if you have one of the newer Photoshop editions, to use some of their 3d features... I did a series of prints of these Star Wars snowflakses: http://anthonyherreradesigns.com/index.php/8-ahd-blog/14-star-wars-snowflakes-2014
For those i converted the source image to hard black/white, then did some steps with expanding and contracting selections and painting over, to make sure there were no too small holes, or too thin walls... After that I simply extruded the image directly in photoshop (I believe it was CS5) and exported it to Cura.
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