A halftone study

I saw some prints of halftones today and saw that the solid color parts were all different sized circles. I was thinking this may work well for doing a v-carve on the cnc.

I took a pic and converted to gray scale, used the Filter>Pixelate>>Halftone Color filter and converted it to half tone image.


That was then saved into a bitmap, which was used to trace and make the tool path boundaries for the v-carve operation. This is the rendering on maple with a black fill.


I'm going to try saving it to a vector file directly to see if I can clean up the trace a little more.

I'm finally getting around to trying this. I found some new software here that does a good job creating halftones either using circles, lines, or squares. I didn't use it's gcode exporter, instead I exported the dxf and imported it into vcarve so I could see how it was going to run.

I'm working on two of these for my wife as a mothers day gift.



I'm using some 1/4" maple ply that I sealed and am cutting through a layer of paint mask. I'll plan to spray paint to before removing the mask.

darren if you can change the line screen ruling to a higher ruling you will get smoother transitions from the highlights to shadows

hmm, I don't see that setting on the software, perhaps the line spacing?

The first one just finished and there are a few place where the mask didn't get cut through, may just be my table is low in that area, so will play with that one some more. It took about an hour and a half, the other is estimated at 2 hours, so will give it a go tomorrow.

Well, Going to consider this project a bust. The first one as Larry pointed out didn't have enough shadowing, so it's pretty hard to make out


Masking did work great though, very clean release from the wood overall, just had to be careful pulling away at the edges.


I played around with the shadowing of the image in photoshop, but found that the hole spacing and sizes needed to be adjusted to get more contrast. This caused some overlapping of the holes, which wasn't going to work.


After 3 attempts I'm giving up on it, the top veneer and masking is getting thin enough it pulls away with the bit I'm using. I do get better results if I expand the size out to about 24", but my table can only do up to 16" wide, so looks like a project for another time. Maybe one of you folks with a larger machine will have better luck, but does take a while to crank it out even at 100 IPM