A few months ago, I released diyCAM: Carve, the first of several planned CAM programs, with the goal of making CAM software more affordable for DIY users. I've just released v1.2 now, which in addition to the profile from alpha pathing that was added in v1.1, adds support for cutting halftone versions of photographs, as well as a lot of small tweaks and a few bug fixes since the initial release.

Carve's primary focus is on 3d carving from heightmaps with both path and simulation preview. The additional ability to convert the alpha channel to a profile path, makes it easy to cutout odd shaped carvings, as well as serving as a basic 2d cutout tool. To speed up carve time, especially when you plan to cut things out, Carve includes options to ignore areas either by being solid white or by alpha channel. In many cases, this can cut carve time by half or more. The attached images were all done just with Carve, no secondary vector program or hand cutting.

Features:
  • Quickly and easily generates GCode from images for 3D Carvings and Lithopanes
  • NEW! Create Halftone style carvings from photographs
  • NEW! Calculate Profile Path from Alpha Channel of an image to cutout your carving
  • 3D carving simulation/preview with both result and path visualization
  • Hog Pass to remove the bulk of the material followed by the detailed Carve pass for faster carvings
  • Bit and Material managers


I've started working on the next program, a vector/vcarve app. If there's anything you think would be good to have, I started a thread here. Alternatively, you can email me at support at diy-cam dot com. The same goes for feature requests for carve - while I want to keep it fairly focused, I'm always willing to consider requests for new features.

diyCAM: Carve is $50 for a single user license
www.diy-cam.com

Video of setting up and carving the cat halftone: