this is 3d engraving what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales
where i'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't
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to keep making this video is all about 3d
engraving how to go about making the files
the basics of how to go about engraving them but that's very much dependent on
your laser i've just spent the last week doing this
over and over and over again trying to find the
easiest and simplest way to create any 3d object into a depth map
file that you can then engrave using your laser cutter
to begin with let's understand how to get these types of results
these results are done with something called a depth map
this here is what a depth map would look like now a depth map
has a gradient of colors from black to white this lets your laser
know where to use full power and where to use the minimum power
this is usually under something called a variable power setting
so whatever is furthest away from us is going to be black
and whatever is closest to us will be white for our example i'll be using the
stl file of this triceratops skull i've already downloaded it so
let's head on over to blender here we are within a
nice new fresh blender file now if you don't know
blender at all don't worry i have an entire blender precision
series free here on youtube so go check that out
more than anything just to get a grasp of the controls so you're not completely
lost but you can definitely just join in and
follow exactly what i'm saying here and follow the clicks that i'm doing
down here so here within blender let's delete our cube and let's go file
import stl as you can see here we can go ahead and
import an fbx and obj whatever other format you want but we have an stl here
so let's go stl in my downloads and i'm downloading the
triceratops skull so that's now being downloaded
let me just zoom out fantastic and the origin point is down here so let's bring
that to the center of the scene so geometry to origin
great and now let's just rotate this on the x by 90
the other way around and let's also give this a little rotation on the y
by 45 degrees brilliant now i don't have a camera in my scene
you can see here my hierarchy that i don't you might have a
camera so you can use that camera but i'm going
to bring in a camera now and then from that camera i'm going to
go g z and bring it up now i'm going to go
point to focus in and you'll see that it's not pointing
towards the triceratops skull so let's go into item then let's change
all these rotations to zero fantastic now with that done i just want
to double check that my camera if i hit one on the numpad that it is
pretty much almost as close as it can get to there so just down from that line
so g z down to about there and that just means that this will be
the whitest it can be the the easiest way possible
don't worry i'll go into a lot more detail
now let's hit zero to go look through the camera
and now with our camera selected let's go to the camera settings down here
and then let's change this from perspective to orthographic
this needs to be orthographic if not you'll not get the correct grayscale
let's increase the orthographic scale now to fit
our model now just before that i am going to change this
to a square though so i'm going to go over here to my output properties i'm
going to change this both of these actually both of those i
want to change them to 2 000 brilliant now from there i can go
back to my camera settings and carry on zooming out in my orthographic
scale so i get something around about there
brilliant now from here i'm going to just change a couple more
settings which is our render engine i want it to be in cycles i also want it
to be in gpu compute because most of us will have a more
powerful gpu than cpu to be able to compute this
on top of that we're going to go to our film drop down here
and turn on transparent this will make sure that will let us
remove the background if we want that removed
now lastly just before we render this out there is one more little setting
that if we go over to our output properties
i don't know if this does much of a difference but change this color depth
to 16. this would mean that we have a smoother grayscale
transition so now with that done let's go ahead and click on render
now with our camera rendered out this is sort of the result we
should be getting and trust me this is what we're wanting you don't need any
lights or anything else because now the real magic happens
inside of the compositing tab now don't be scared here i understand
this can be quite overwhelming but it's very simple what we're doing here
so we're going to turn on use nodes and then here within the compositing
we're actually don't even need this so let's disconnect
that and now let's get ourselves a viewer to
see what exactly we're doing that's shift day and
then we go search and let's put in viewer
so with the viewer we'll just put that over here and we're going to put the
depth over to the image now i'm just going to
scale this background so you click the viewer
this lets me scale this in and move this off to the side a little bit
and let's just change this so we have more viewing
space for you guys fantastic so with that there we're going
to add just a couple more nodes first one
and most importantly is we need to normalize
our data so when we click this over on this line you can see we almost
already have our end result but it's the other way around so let's
go and add an invert so
click on invert put that on the line it's now inverted
okay brilliant but i would like to have a little bit more control of what our
output is here okay well let's go shift a
and what i like using is something called gamma
so with the gamma you will now be able to
move this up and down and you can see we get the change
if you hold down shift you move in decimal places so you have a little bit
more precision so i don't know let's go for
something around there brilliant now if you're not happy with
how white the white is and how black the black is and this one's completely
optional you do not need this one i usually just
output this here there is one other one which is called
an rgb curves so i'm sure you've used one
of these before so with rgb curves you're able to
change the curves here to be more in line
of what you're looking for by adding more contrast to the image
but for me i'm going to remove this rgb curves
reconnect the image there and i'm going to use this
as my output now there is one last thing if you're not
wanting this black background there is a very easy way to remove it
because we've set this up as a transparent
we can now just get our alpha and connect it to the alpha of the viewer
and there you have it that there is the final output image
so let's put this out click on the viewer
now we're going to go to item save this image as and just decide where you're
going to put it and i'm going to put it here and i'm
going to call it try depth and save that image
now of course there are other formats maybe an open
exr might have more or an hdr might have more bit
but to be honest i've had perfect results
with just a png so save this image as and now let's go over the laser settings
so after many many many attempts and a lot of testing
this here is what i found works the best for me
for my three millimeter laser ply so this is a four pass process so
remember that i'm using a glowforge which is a co2
40 watt laser the settings for all of my passes
are up on screen right now the main difference is
on my first pass i do have a minimum power of 10
my second pass i've removed that minimum power so that it can go to zero
on my third pass i put down the power but increase my resolution and with my
final pass i just decrease the power once again
and i go to the highest resolution that i can
now here's the magic trick yes right this minute
it looks atrocious and trust me i really thought there was a problem
here but then after a little bit of research i found
the craziest solution which is quite frankly wash this under a
tap gently with a toothbrush the change
is astounding and as long as you're gentle no details
will be lost do keep in mind that every single material
and laser is going to come out with different outcomes
there's nothing i can really do to help you further than this
but i really do think that if you follow the current structure that i have set up
on my four passes you might even be able to do it
with two that you will eventually get to a
desired effect that you like now of course this took me between eight
to twelve laser hour time to get me to this
end result but i'm really happy that i did because now i have a whole
really powerful new tool to add to my laser engraving
toolkit i also did a little bit of playing around with some
hardwood and with some acrylic which gives some really interesting results
especially with the acrylic where you would be able to shine a light from the
side of it because that gives you like a a 3d
hologram sort of effect and the hardwood you could get some
really good resolution but unfortunately i didn't have any good hardwood around
i think the best might be maple or cherry
but once again that's on your hands to do some really deep
testing to get some fantastic results now while we're at it i also want to
just show you how to really easily get some very clean cut
lines from this because maybe you're wanting to create
a 3d engraved badge and you're wanting the outline of this
well instead of sitting there with the pen tool to do all this
we're going to do this we're going to set the gamma to something crazy like
6000 or even higher because i still have a little bit more of a white point there
let's go 12 000 and there we go let's go with that and now we're going to
export this as a png and then we'll bring it in
to inkscape now here within inkscape let's go ahead and bring in
both of these images we're going to bring in our tri depth
and our tri-depth cut they're both going to come here
right next to each other now what we need to do is first of all
let's grab these both because they are the same
size and let's center align them on top of each other
the reason for this is because i don't think
that our cut is exactly center aligned now once they're both on top of each
other let's select your cut one and we're going to go
to path trace bitmap then we're going to click ok and
as easy as that we now have a bitmap created
so i'm just going to grab this bitmap i'm just going to move this three to the
side one two three i'm going to select the
image that's the background delete that and bring this bitmap back
one two three now i'm just going to add a stroke
remove the fill and that there has a perfect vector cut line all the
way around this and it's as simple as selecting both of
these
scaling them to your desired scale that you're wanting
putting them in or export and then just saving this as a pdf and then uploading
it to your own laser cutting software
you now know how to create your own 3d laser engraving
file from blender me personally i really think that creating your
own objects instead of downloading things from the internet such as
stls and objs is going to give you much better results because you're able
to control the high points and the low points and really where
you're wanting the laser engraving to truly shine
now if you don't know blender yourself i have an entire precision
modeling course completely for free here on youtube the link is down in the
description a huge thank you to my patrons you guys
are absolutely awesome and it means so much to me and if you enjoy the
content that i'm making here and you think i'm worthy of your support
i'd love to have you there too don't forget that i do have a discord
channel now that you can go ahead and join the link is down in the
description thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue
you