The Greenman here is from their stuff:
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There goes the next four hours. This is really cool, thanks!
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Just firing one up, a simple floral inspired design. We’ll see how it turns out.
I had to modify the curve to get a full dynamic range greyscale, no big deal, It topped out kind of low and bottomed out well short of black.
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I have to do that frequently. I just DLed my daily quota and will see what is useful, Very different eyes than when I was using them in virtual worlds.
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Wow! I missed that one. I will have to look tomorrow when I can look again. We cant hand out the textures but we can link the page it is on 
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It was in the Indian textures pack, I just nabbed the first one that looked cool but didn’t have a crazy amount of detail.
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Oh also I ran it again at much more aggressive settings, got this instead:
(Original on left, looks like a garbage fire in comparison)
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The tricky bit now is how to smooth the fine dots, get rid of any char and keep the look. This is a good time to try out that half in thick paduk.
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There’s no char per se, but there is residue from the hard engrave. I cleaned it up as much as I wanted to with denatured alcohol, and I like the look now. As for the dots, I could probably fix that with a defocused pass, but I also don’t mind that look either. Gives it a rough texture with maximum crispness. Any defocusing will lose detail, and that’s not my aesthetic choice here.
So I’m calling this one a successful test for my purposes. I feel like padauk doesn’t get enough contrast in engraves for my taste and has even more residue, so I’ll stick with maple, maybe go basswood at some point.
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half inch thick maple would work nicely. For that kind of engraving the thicker the better, especially if going out to the edges. Half inch basswood would likely be a charred mess. but leaving 1/8 edge on a 1/2 inch engrave and then inlay it would be awesome. 
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Looking at my sample set Maple, walnut and Paduk were the only ones I have that stood up to 100 full without burning.
Wow!
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Bookmarked this for future use. Thank you!
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Did you download the TIFF file? I’m still trying to get my brain wrapped around the heightmap stuff…
Tiff is very accurate and should be readable by any graphics editor. I go into Gimp and set various masks and save them as XCF and also export up to several different files as PNGs as I make lots of layers and each manipulated differently depending on need.
If you think as mountains with snow on the top there are 255 shades of gray and pure white which is the only shade ignored by the GFUI
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I tried this very aggressive on 0.56 Walnut but not aggressive enough. the cut was only 0.3ish deep. I fooled around a bit with the levels and making that center more spherical and the inner ring of leaves higher than the outer. Might make an awesome doorknob
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So, this is a great site, sure, but I hate the points/credits system and needing an account. I wonder if there’s a good free option out there, like svgrepo or svgsilh or openclipart… Finding heightmaps is not nearly as easy as svg/other rasters… I’d guess because it’s more niche. Maybe this is as good as it gets?
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I think that in the early days folk would come in and get a gig or two for free when their key market is the movie industry that really needs and makes use of those huge files. and can afford good money to do so. Second Life manages with much smaller 1024x1024 max texture files and suddenly there is a million folk scouring the internet for textures that even the very successful make hundreds of dollars a month, and most not even break even. That is why they set up the limits.
Later Second Life and the other grids demanded rights on their TOS in what I think was Lawyer absurdity because they could get away with it. However CG Textures (as was their name then) shut everyone off from their stuff saying it could not be used in the grids, but that which was downloaded under the old rules was still under the old rules. I had a huge collection so did not go back there as I wanted to keep selling in the grids,
So now I am doing actual stuff instead of virtual and inquired as to what the rules were for this and got a green light as long as the links to the textures were passed about and not the textures themselves, so with that go ahead I passed the information here. 
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