the pattern started as a tileable texture from adobe stock. but i did a lot of photoshop to get it to be the right grayscale to 3D engrave.
i did basically hat you suggested to get the shape. but any degree off from perfectly perpendicular can throw off the curves. if it as a smaller object, it would be easier, because i could more easily print/compare on my printer. but because i don’t have a large format printer, i had to tile, which also has potential distortion issues.
Man, that’s not too long at all. Now you’ve got me into the consideration faze. Again, really super job. Also, thanks for all the inspiration you have given me and others.
fwiw, i haven’t engraved a finished guitar body yet. i have an old beater body that was a sacrifice (it gave up a neck and hardware for another build) that i have some testing plans for, but haven’t done it yet. it’s got a black lacquer finish on it, so i’m really curious how that’s gonna turn out.
Oh wow, you totally nailed it! Part of me wants to float an opaque turquoise resin in the voids then polish the whole thing up to a mirror finish, but it’s probably mush better as it is. I’m just resin-crazy right now.
deep is just a function of power/speed combo. if you want deeper, slow it down and/or use more power. what makes this work is that it has grayscale gradients so the depth is gradual and dimensional, not just a single depth.
in this case, i started with a tile i downloaded from adobe stock that had some grayscale shadows in it and used photoshop to exaggerate it. and many, many test tile prints until i got it right. i don’t have the technical skills to create a true depth map.
