I have 2 goals, and maybe this takes 2 softwares, i don't know.

1.) hand drawn PCBs - where the tool would convert the 2-color bitmap to vectors that go around the contours of the PCB traces - out a certain distance to account for the engraver size... (something like wintopo pro's edge detection (simple) mode, except it'd need the ability to make the gcode lines 1/2 tool size away from the traces to preserve the trace thickness)... I don't want to do scanlines - too inefficient. too slow.

2.) 3D milling (heightfield 256 levels of grey), user specifies width/height/depth. makes efficient contours instead of running scanline by scanline over areas it doesn't need to cut, and great if it took multiple passes for milling down into thick/hard material - you could tell it how many layers to remove incrementally, and the thickness of each layer to remove... extra cool would be options for roughing pass and finishing pass, smoothing of the final vectors (cause pixels are blocky), etc...


free or at least trialware would be nice.


(sorry if this is slightly similar to the other guy's post, but i think this is more specific...)

edit1: looks like I can export vectors from photoshop. magic wand, select something, Alt-Windows, Go to paths, Click on icon at bottom that looks like a spline editor, path made from selection boundary, export paths to adobe Illustrator. in illustrator, export to DXF... import dxf into cambam then set up machining.....
edit2: looks like cambam also has a heightmap importer... though it doesn't do efficient contours, rather it does the scan line by line method...