In most of my 3D routing I use a technique to route the sides of the reliefs and leave an onion skin at the base. In this fashion the top edge is finished and any hand work is done at the bottom of the piece. If I am gluing two routed pieces back to back I leave an onion skin ridge intact on both pieces. This way the glue squishes out away from the edge making finishing much easier. It is cleaned up in seconds after the piece dries.
Below is a fish relief I created in EnRoute. It is a relatively simple relief... the fish body is created using the dome tool. The fins were created separately as flat reliefs and then merged with the body. The eyes and fin were added to the relief.
Once I had merged all the pieces I used the offset tool to create two lines - one 0.6" and one 0.2" outside of that. The outside line was used to create a relief of 0.75" thick. Then I modify that relief with a value of negative 0.75". Both reliefs are aligned to the bottom of the plate and then merged together. This forms a stepped 'bowl' with a fish inside. I've found that using this stepped shape breaks less bits.
