The first thing was to create a plate. I used the dome tool to create a negative impression.
What would become the spaghetti was done as a flat relief. The meatballs were created using the dome tool. Nothing hard here.
Then I applied a bitmap from my TEXTURE MAGIC collection. It is called spaghetti of course. I had to play with it a bit to figure out the right value to look good.
I modified the spaghetti oval and the meatballs by selecting them and a vector oval and then using the dome tool to hump up a good sized pile of delicious.
I used one other bitmap - the old standby, SPLOTCHES, to give the meatballs some meaty texture.
The letter outline was created as a flat relief that was .75 inches tall. Then I used the same oval vector that I had used to hump up the spaghetti and meatballs (and the same value in the input box) to dome up the lettering outline.
Looking in the front view I had to nudge everything into place vertically. The lettering border needed to come way down while the spaghetti needed to go up a tich.
It is important to keep checking all the way through to make sure the program is doing what you had in mind.
I thought the lettering was looking a little plain. A very light pass with the splotches texture would fix that in a hurry!
Before we merged everything together it was time to look in the front view and nudge things up or down as necessary.
I had created a zero height relief that was a little over sized. It had a small step in the edge so the router but wouldn't be running up agains the full height block of Precision Board. I used this was the base to merge highest all the other pieces to.
The file was tool pathed with a 3/8 ball nose bit @ 50% overlap for the first pass and a 1/8" ball nose and an 80% overlap in the final. As quick as that we had a plate of spaghetti - complete with meatballs.
I hope Gary likes spaghetti 'cause it looks good enough to eat!
-dan
