This tutorial will show you how to make text that looks good when engraved inside crystal. Extruded text is made up of a front and a back face. Two layers of points. This engraves opaque. If you want strong, bright text, you will need more layers.

Blender can make mountains from height maps, and this is a tutorial to show you how. The height map I've used is represented by a grayscale bitmap. Black being the lowest point, white the highest. Blender is able to deform a mesh based on the pixel colour of a texture. Download the following height map of two New Zealand mountains, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.png, for use in the tutorial.

I engraved a crystal paper weight for Jenima today. To create the text I used Blender. First I created a proof for her to approve, then I rotated the text to suit the laser. To get it the right size and position I used 1 Blender unit to 1 mm.

3d lasers engrave point clouds into crystal. To engrave a photo it must be converted into black and white. My initial workflow was to create an 8 bit grey scale image in GIMP and then convert it into a 1 bit, black and white, bitmap using a package called 2d Photo, then into DibSlice or LaserImage to create a point cloud. I'm now able to skip 2d Photo by creating the black and white image in GIMP.

I've found an SVG wysiwyg called SVG Edit. You can download the source and host it yourself, or you can do as I've done and embed it in an iFrame using

<iframe src="http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/tags/stable/editor/svg-editor.html"
width="600" height="600"></iframe>

Scalable Vector Graphics are part of the web standard - and I'd like to see them used more often. They are line drawings that can be enlarged without losing quality. The fonts on your screen are a similar format.

AudioField, version 6.x-1.0-beta1, did not show any players after I installed it in Drupal. After looking through the code I found that the developer had used sloshes, \\\\\, instead of slashes, /////. By switching them I was able to make the module work.