Tried out the 3D engrave on a small piece of acrylic. This was a test run for a larger version of the same picture to be made into an LED light. Pretty happy with it and can’t wait to run the larger one closer to Christmas.
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The shading in the torso looks really fabulous - I know it’s a function of the light getting less the further up it goes, but still!
BTW, if you’re going to do a large design there are posts on here talking about graduating the engrave so the light can get further up the design, those might be worth you looking into
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Sadly I can’t find the post that talks about it from a certainty point of view - only a bunch of posts saying “I’m gonna do this as recommended here”
Sigh
If I find it I’ll post it here (if you find it, post it here!)
I didn’t exactly find it, I posted it. All of my engravings were done as a gradient.
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So how would one do a gradient? Is that something that can be done in photoshop or is it a setting?
I did it with a fill gradient in Inkscape, then exported as a png, then re-imported the png and replaced the vector text.
There are lots of ways to do gradients, photoshop/gimp can do it too. Just google “make a gradient fill in (program)”.
Thanks! Last question, light to dark or dark to light? (Btw thanks for replying, I love your work)
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Depends on where your light is. You want it to be shallower closer to the light, the theory is that the engrave casts a shadow on subsequent engraved areas. Think of it like a concert, you want the short people in front, so everyone can see the light show.
While I’m not 100% sold that using a gradient makes much of an impact on practice, the theory is good so I went with it. I think it may have more to do with total engraved area, siphoning off light and preventing internal reflections, but I haven’t tried to test it empirically.
I went from about 50% grey to 100% black in my gradient, I wanted to ensure it was all fairly strongly engraved.
And thanks, but I’m actually a bit of a dabbler when it comes to acrylic. Someone else could come along with a lot more info to share. You should listen to them instead 
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As noted you wand the lowest closer to the light, I have done this for other reasons that I make two (extra) layers in Gimp with my finer grayscale on top and the gradient on the bottom. I can thus adjust the transparency of the upper layer generically till I get the effect I am after. The I create a new layer from visible and turn off the other layers, I then make my final image from that.
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wow, that looks great