Use an image to 3D relief workflow with closed STL output

Estimating scene distance is the easy half. A full-scene depth field spreads its range across whatever the camera saw, including sky, floor, and background furniture, so the subject ends up occupying a thin band of the available height. Converting an image to 3D relief means deciding how much of that band the subject deserves and what happens to everything behind it.

DepthCarve exposes that decision directly: black and white points to discard dead range, gamma and contrast to redistribute it, background flattening to pin distant scenery to a low plane, and a taper to keep the edge from becoming a vertical wall. Those controls act on the estimate, so exploring them costs nothing after the initial preview.

A relief STL from a displacement export is often a zero-thickness sheet. Slicers and CAM packages disagree about what that means, and the result ranges from a mesh that needs extensive repair to one that silently slices as a single layer. DepthCarve builds the top surface, side walls, and a bottom face, so the downloaded STL is a closed solid with a stated width in millimetres.

Set the physical width first, because the relief height and base thickness only mean something relative to it. A shallow relief across 200 mm reads very differently from the same height across 40 mm, and the mesh grid needs to follow the smaller features rather than the overall size.

A single view never sees the far side of a nose, the inside of a collar, or the space between an arm and a torso. The estimate will still return smooth values there, which is precisely why those regions need review. Isolated bright islands, thin connections, and steep walls are the usual places a design fails after it has already been approved.

Treat the STL as prepared input. Inspect it in the program that will actually cut or print it, check the bounding box against the stock, and simulate before committing material. When a job needs more than the surface, the production bundle adds raw float depth plus the provider's normals, point cloud, GLB, and camera information while those temporary links remain valid.