I was at a rustic homegoods store where I’d seen a piece, similar to and larger than this, hand carved. I figured my robot could do it for me.
I first painted a large redwood slab white. Then designed a tool in Autodesk Maya that procedurally draws trees. After ‘drawing’ a lot of them, this was my favorite, so I saved it’s alpha out as an image, and brought that into Easel for carving. Only took 20 min for the rough pass (.25" 3-flute upcut bit) and another 20min for the finish (.125" 3-flute upcut bit), both running at 90ipm.
I did custom paint touchup after, to make the tree ‘wrap around’ the left-hand side of the stock.
I plan to do this again, but do the finish pass with a v-bit instead: Should get a lot more small branch detail, and a nice beveled effect overall.
The whole piece measures 17x30x1.5":
The shadows are pretty extreme in this image, The cut is is only .125" deep. And I was a bit to hasty with the pics, and hadn’t yet sanded down the first pass, so you can see some toolpaths in the main part of the tree trunk.
