In Germany you need a coin to get a shopping cart. Recently you find more and more opening devices that you insert in the lock to get the cart without a coin. I embossed one of those with a turtle, where I used a stl file instead of a picture.
Many embossings shown until now are based on photos or ai imagery. I wanted to try something else and do an embossing based on an stl file. Stl is one of th standard formats for 3d printers and you can a lot of free objects in the format. Especially thingiverse.com hosts a lot. For this example I chose a turtle which is available under the creative commons. Have a look there, they offer a lot of thinks and most are creative commons.
Now this is a 3d file. For the F1 Ultra and XCS we need a heightmap. There is a tool called stl2png that can be used to convert any stl into a heightmap. Fortunately there is a javascript edition of this tool available open source, so you can even download it and run it free of charge. I used the version available from github. Although this is online, it uses you local computer for processing, so no image is sended to any server. I chose top image and left the resolution and offset at their defaults.
Afterwards I saved the resulting heightmap.
Note that this heightmap is still a square one. I loaded this to a graphic programm, added some black pixels to all sides, selected an elipse outline and made all pixels outside of this invisible.
Setup the machine like specified above. Carefully set the focus to the top of the material. Doublecheck the position of the design.
This took about an hour, but it was fascination to see how the turtle appears more and more from the steel.
After step 2 the turtle was rather black. So I lifted the focus to about 3mm above the surface of the stainless. I used a vector elipse of the same size than the design. This cleaned the surface and gave the object a nice look.