StandingWave
I was interested in making a 'wavy panel' that shows a pattern that looks like the sandy bottom at the beach. You can find people that sell these on the web, and often the price is several hundred dollars for a sheet of machined MDF. Some of these designs, admittedly, are better than just sandy waves, so I don't deny their place. Still, it was too rich for me, and I wanted to apply this pattern to my own designs, not to make wall coverings. In particular, I also wanted to be able to wrap these waves onto curved surfaces using WarpDriver or a 4th axis system. Although Vectric's V-Carve Pro has various texture designs, I could never get them to look very random or wavy enough; most often they looked more like roughly gouged wood. So, instead of wrestling with it, I wrote StandingWave. This program creates EPS vector files (or bitmaps if you prefer) that can be imported into VCarve Pro; you then V-Carve these vectors using a large ball-nosed bit. I use 1" diameter bits, and it works well. One of the cool things about these patterns is that they are periodic in both the X and Y directions, so you can stack sheets in each direction. Although the pattern generation uses random numbers, you can exactly reproduce the pattern at any time you wish. The program outputs a text file that gives all the parameters required to do this. Once you have the parameters that give the look you want, you can then create many variations with a click until you find the one you want to carve. It takes ~1 minute to create files, and another ~1-2 minutes to load the pattern files from StandingWave and make a Vectric preview.
If you find that this program has been useful for you, or has improved the value of your toolchain, please consider making a contribution to support the continued development of StandingWave.
Program was updated February 6, 2013 to add panel improvements, metric compatibility, single-file EPS vectors ...
Copy this URL to your broser address bar to access the files
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r2jypi8lzt8svhx/lJ9bSQsyeV
If you find that this program has been useful for you, or has improved the value of your toolchain, please consider making a contribution to support the continued development of StandingWave.
Program was updated February 6, 2013 to add panel improvements, metric compatibility, single-file EPS vectors ...
Copy this URL to your broser address bar to access the files
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r2jypi8lzt8svhx/lJ9bSQsyeV