How do I go about modeling this pendant?
Hello everyone,
I am trying to model the 100 dollar bill pendant as shown in the image attached. Is it possible or advisable to use Solidworks for this type of design? If so, can I get some guidance as to how to model it?
If not, which software is more preferable to make such a highly detailed model? I would want to 3D print it afterward.
Thank you.
2 Answers
It can be done. Solidworks is not the tool for this. The workflow is dependent on the software you use. That said, normally you would take an image of the $100 bill, and create a gray scale image of it that would be a displacement map. Then you would create geometry from the displacement map. Try googling "displacement map to geometry" and "bump map to geometry" this should put you on the right track to get there. I used to use a program called Bryce that would generate random gray scale gradients and then create terrain geometry from that. White would be high elevation and black would be low. See picture. Blender should be able to do this. Also try googling "Material displacement to mesh". This is also going to require some Photoshop or GIMP skills to clean up the gray scale image, since the $100 bill has a lot of detail that you do not want , like all the line patterns to make it hard to forge. Also see the coin pic. White is raised, and black is lowered. Anything in between is somewhere in the middle.
Thank you so much, everyone. I found out that Solidworks has a 3D texture feature for creating 3D patterns. So I used this site: https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ to generate the bump map (I think) of the dollar bill image and then used it as a 3D pattern on Solidworks.
It did not come out clear, so I guess I will have to clean it up like Terry said, probably with something other than an online converter.
I hope to come back with a better result, fingers crossed.
Thank you for the assistance everyone. If you have other pointers for me, I would appreciate it, thank you.
