Door panel with 3D

[Jim Becker]

I'm repurposing a small bookshelf that my father originally had built by someone to hold his sheet music and books for his organ playing enjoyment. He made me bring it (and the sheet music...) north with me earlier in the year prior to his passing. As an open shelving unit, it's not terribly useful around here, so I'm making it a closed cabinet for my older daughter to store her snacks, etc., in her "sorta-apartment-like-space" here in our home. While I could just do a plain paneled door, I have this big yellow thing called a CNC. So I put it to work to make a more interesting door panel with a carved rooster.

This started as 5/4 full 1" thick material and was pocket surfaced down with my spoilboard cutter and then the carving was roughed and finished before cutting the edges. I think it's going to look quite nice when it's done.

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[Steve Jenkins]

I do believe you’re right

[Mark Bolton]

Nice work Jim. Where are you getting your 3D files. Or are you drawing them yourself?

[Jim Becker]

Mark that's just an ordinary "stock" rooster in VCarve Pro's Clipart Gallery. I haven't delved into getting more 3D stuff yet, but eventually it does become a factor because most of the "free" STL on the web has personal use only restrictions. I may in the future upgrade to Aspire to get modeling capability, but right now, there's no cash for that nor time for the additional learning curve.

[Mark Bolton]

We are in the same boat here. Im not paying for aspire at this point. I have had pretty good luck running 3D exports out of Sketchup though they can be tricky to get very smooth and the smoothing filter in Vcarve will not get rid of all of it. That said, I am so comfortable in sketchup it has worked very well as an interim solution.

[Brad Shipton]

That texturing you see that highlights the feathers is pretty tricky to model and takes someone with artistic talent. I tried it when I was doing a family crest for someone and finally gave up. I have bought a few thru design make and they have some good options too for signs.

Thanks for sharing Jim. Nice work.

[Mark Bolton]

Agreed. I found a paid plugin for sketchup called artisan that allows you to sculpt in 3D with brushes. It works pretty well and working on a very large scale in SU then importing the stl into vcarve does pretty well.

I've had an artistic background drawing, modeling, sculpting, since I was young and have always kept up with digital stylus drawing with programs like gimp and photoshop which I'm thankful for. But same.as Jim the learning curve of aspire is not something I have time for now.

[Jim Becker]

I look at it this way right now...for personal stuff, there's a ton of STL available to play with. For a paying customer where copyright comes into play, there are quite a few sources to acquire a graphic and that can be charged as part of the job. And for something that needs to be custom, there are resources like Brady Watson (IBLD.com) and others who can do extraordinary 3D scanning or 3D model development, again charged to the job.

[Jim Becker]

Well, this little exercise is completed and I'm very happy with the end result. The original bookcase was something my father had made to fit between his electric organ and a wall to hold sheet music and organ books. A couple months before he died, he compelled me to bring it north from Florida and use it up here. We had no use for a bookcase, but I knew I'd find a project for it. It is sturdy, but, um...not as square as it should be. I assure you the door is square, however! LOL At any rate, I got a pretty good color match and it looks pleasing. The rooster really sets things off nicely, too. After finishing things up today, I gifted it to my older daughter for her rooms so she would have more space to store this and that...it more or less matches all the other furniture I created for her. (I set up a mini-apartment for her in the house so she could get used to the idea of eventually living independently...she has significant emotional issues due to early childhood trauma in Russia) I think my father would be pleased with that. For reference, the unit is about 48" tall.

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