Depthmap production on local machine possible?

Community Laser Talk
1

Getting a bit frustrated.

AI is all good and well, but if i hear another “sculptok” i’m gonna stab.

Is there a way to produce depth maps from images for engraving locally on a machine i have on my desk? Have RTX graphics here so it should be doable ?

All i’m finding is either super basic online things that lose all the detail, need to dox myself for or subscriprion services, which…nope. (not yet anyway). Tintertubes/youtube is full of those.

Sorry, just venting a bit, every other video i see is “sculptok this, sculptok that”.

2

What is sculptok?

Have you tried out LightBurn’s grayscale mode?

This video does a great job explaining how it works:

3

This one has nothing to do with depth maps, those are for relief engraving on fiber lasers. Think coins etc. If i were to just slap an image as per this video it would just make a mess as its not a depth map.

4

You can update your profile to include the fiber laser, which will help us better understand what hardware you’re using.

The profile update link is in the License Management dropdown in the upper right corner of the forum window.

5

Fair enough, and done, thanks.

6

Not directly from within LightBurn. A Google search should produce a list of other resources (paid and free) to help with this conversion. :slight_smile:

8

I think that’s precisely his issue. I also found it very difficult to find such converters and in the end, all videos links back to sculptok, and most others have “free” in the search link, but then you have to pay for download the images. I didn’t find many suitable tools either.

You might try Free AI Depth Map Generator — No Sign-Up, No Watermark | Upsampler At least it seems you can use it without a paywall and subscription fees. Maybe this as well: Anemoia - Advanced WebGL Tools | Image Compare, Depth Map, 3D Viewer
It seems, Blender is also able to do it using plugins.

9

Yep, already found those two, and they’re the ones that lose any meaningful detail besides most basic of depth.

Not really keen on getting into blender - its yet another can of worms to open.
Found something called zoedepth tiled, looked very promising but i could never make it work, i’m not a coder. A million errors in the prompt etc…

Even free chatbots, running most likely gpt, as soon as you prompt it to generate images/depthmaps just shove out a popup to get paid…

For all the AI in the world - it’s pretty useless…and frustrating…

10

Playing around with Google Gemini, generated some maps but it outputs all the compression artifacts as well. Haven’t tried engraving yet, just seeing what is possible there.

Input image:

image
image1496×1496 252 KB

Outputs:

image
image1024×1024 73.1 KB

image
image1024×1024 98 KB

Not sure how will engrave, any comment from people experienced in depth engraving ?

Thinking of throwing some stones tomorrow at these images see what comes out…
Anyone with good settings for deep stone engraving ?

Cheers…

11

ComfyUI with Depth Anything V3 or Marigold.

And a CAD program like Zbrush, Blender or Aspire to modify the output.

or use Sculptok.

12

Seems to look OK, I’m just recovering from a two disk crash. I just guessed at the settings. Used your second photo.

M60 JPT M7 MOPA - F254mm

20260301_133652
20260301_1336521920×2560 1.35 MB

image
image1134×701 177 KB

13

That steel coin ? how deep did it go, how long did it take with these settings ?

14

Actually it’s a brass coin from Amazon. They are generally quite yellow. I probably was running too much power at 50% causing the metal to look more burnt.

Took about about 100 minutes (1:48).

I’d guesstimate a bit over one mm for depth, they are 3mm thick coins.

:grinning_cat:

1 Like
15

Yeah, my first try at coins was a disaster :smiley: brass dont stick to magnets…

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image1201×901 121 KB

1 Like
16

You just need a brass magnet. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Good luck.

:grinning_cat:

1 Like