The process behind mine was unnecessarily convoluted, but did open the way for more types of work.

I started by creating a mesh in blender. I focused mostly on vertical features since this would be a CNC. I did try to keep the thickness of the material in mind to make sure the bevels would be accurate, but I ended up modeling it way thicker anyways since it gave me more control.

By using the Z coordinates of the object, I was able to color the object’s material based on depth.

Put a camera over it and hit render, and we essentially have a depth map. I had the option to use openEXR to get 32-bit float color depth, but I ended up using 16-bit .tiff because that’s the best that deskproto will take. I didn’t want to use .jpg or .png because they tend to compress the gamma and would actually distort the curves on the final CNC. The rest involved just putting that file into deskproto and generating the tool path.

The final result turned out really well. There was a minimal loss of detail, and most of the edges were well preserved.

Technically I could put an .stl into deskproto to achieve the same thing, but by creating a depth map, it opens the possibility to merge this surface with other depth maps using image processing (distorting a mesh would require a complete retopology and would have a limited deformation without increasing the triangle count to absurd levels.)