Downloads

Example PixelCNC Projects

Here are some example demonstration projects to help users become acquainted with how to go about creating certain projects in PixelCNC.

 8"x5" Slow and Steady.pnc - A simple relief carving style project that employs 3D contouring and 2.5D milling operations. The canvas composition comprises several elements that were traced into paths that could then be used to generate some 3D shapes using the Shapes From Paths and Stroke Paths functions.

 6"x6" Skull Fractal Pattern.pnc - A relief carving with an interesting texture. This project uses the 2.5D Offset Milling  (aka Horizontal Milling) operation to rough out the workpiece. Re-roughing is done with a standard Parallel Carving operation to bring it closer to shape before finally coming in with a Tessellated Carving operation for the patterned texture.

10"x12" Pirate V-Carve.pnc - An example of a more advanced V-carving produced from a single image. Parts of the design are too wide for a 1/2" v-bit to cut by itself. A pocket milling operation removes the central material and cleanup of the tiny spots that the endmill can't reach is done in multiple passes with a profile milling operation and the 1/2" v-bit used for the medial-axis carving.

7"x3.5" Nikola Tesla Halftone.pnc - A simple halftone from a photograph. The canvas and Nikola photo raster-layer are set to a thin Z size for the 3D contouring operations' cuts. This halftone combines Conformal Carving and Parallel Carving operations to produce its halftone pattern, cut using a 90 degree v-bit.

 6"x6" Tree Of Life Relief.pnc - The one-and-only classic PixelCNC relief carving project! The original was a black and white image finessed into a 3D-esque depthmap with an image editor before PixelCNC existed. The 3D design has been recreated from the original black and white image using PixelCNC's canvas editing functions. The circular design is a great use case for Spiral Carving which is used for both roughing and finishing.

TGA2STL Utility

This is a command-line utility for converting TGA image files into triangle-optimized *.STL/Stereolithography heightmap meshes. Areas with less detail are represented using fewer triangles while more complicated areas are formed out of a higher number of triangles. This is to reduce the overall polycount of the resulting mesh to improve performance when loading the model file into a program for use.

This utility does have some limitations that may be inconvenient. PixelCNC's ability to export a mesh is a much improved version of the algorithm.

TGA2STL is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/DEF7/TGA2STL and the latest build can be downloaded from the right side of the page under "Releases".