Menu
PicEngrave Pro 6 On Sale at 15% Off The store is open and we are ready to take sales again. Home Of Wagner, Our Little Helper And. At picengrave.com we offer unique, user friendly and affordable image to G-code CNC photo engraving solutions for spindle & laser diodes. Description Engrave Photos with your Laser Upgrade Kit! We have teamed up with the folks over at PicEngrave.com to add support for our upgrade kits in their photo engraving software. With the software you can create awesome engraved images on your CNC machine or your 3D printer!
Grasshopper is an incredibly capable program for creating parametric designs in Rhino. If you've ever worked with another block programming language, like Max, this works very much the same way- you can input information or geometry from your rhino file, pass it through a series of 'blocks' that each represent a different function or transformation, and output new geometry back into your Rhino file.
My Grasshopper sketch works in the following way:
1. Curves, which you drew in Rhino, are input into the sketch.
2. The number slider defines the number of subdivisions along that curve, aka, the points at which your image will be sampled. Since my lines are pretty short, I'm subdividing about 213 times (the exact number is unimportant).
3. the 'Divide' block divides your curves this number of times.
4. The points along which your lines are divided are split into two data streams- one goes into a Point Deconstructor element, which splits apart the XYZ information of every single point.
5. At the same time, the points are being fed into the image sampler. Here, you define the desired dimensions of your image in the Rhino file- use whatever dimensions you want your final product to be. The image sampler will sample at every input point.
5. The output of the image sampler is taken- we only need the new Z information. These values are multiplied by -1.
6. The original X and Y data of every single point is merged with the new Z information of the points. Now, the height of every single point is defined by the brightness of your image.
7. The points are recomposed into lines (polylines).
8. Using the Scale NU block, the new lines are compressed in the Z dimension. A little bit of math is involved here, to find out the correct scaling values- but considering the geometry of the bit you use, you can figure out the maximum cut depth of your paths before your lines start to touch. Because I'm using a 60 degree bit, and my lines in rhino are .125 inches apart, I can cut a maximum of .108 inches into the material. To be a bit more conservative I actually went with an even .100'. (original sampled values were from -1 to 1, so the necessary scale factor was .05)
![Download Download](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125790210/365613407.jpg)
![Download Download](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125790210/936793572.jpg)
9. Finally, the new geometry is moved to the top of the material stock.