I'm still relatively new at 3D modeling, and my main tool of choice right now is OpenSCAD, coming from the programming world, it was a nice fit. However, while it's good at mechanical CAD, I was wondering about more organic shapes. It was difficult for it to handle things beyond a certain size of complexity.
I made an iPhone 4 back cover for
Graftconcepts, and here's
the link.
This time, I tried converting a picture into an extruded pattern for the iPhone back cover. I first searched on Flickr's creative commons library of leaf vein pictures. I had to pick one that was in sharp focus, and relatively high contrast. Then I used GIMP to convert it to grayscale, and then thresholded it. Then I used Inkscape to import the image and convert it into DXF for OpenSCAD. I had to use an extension to save into a DXF format the OpenSCAD likes. And then after that, I was able to import it into OpenSCAD, but it took 10 minutes to do so. So once I had done that, I exported it to STL, then re-imported it back into OpenSCAD for use. After that, it was relatively smooth sailing.
Wil
