Organic Modeling & Sculpting

AI Depth Map

AI Depth Map reads a photo and estimates how far each pixel is from the camera: a grayscale image where white is the nearest point and black the farthest. That image is exactly what Relief needs to carve depth, so a photo of a carved cameo, a face, an animal or a piece of ornament becomes a relief in two clicks.

The AI runs once per image. Everything you adjust afterwards — smoothing, contrast, output resolution — is computed on your machine from that first result, so the sliders answer instantly and cost nothing.

Run ArtisanAIDepthMap, or click AI Depth Map in the Organic group of the File tab, next to Sculpt and Relief. The window opens beside Rhino and stays open while you work in the viewport.

From photo to relief

Select Image — pick a .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .webp. It appears on the left as the Original Image, with its file name and size in the status line.
Generate Depth — sends the picture to the depth model (Depth Anything V2). After a few seconds the Depth Map appears on the right and the status line reads Depth map ready with the map’s size. Large photos are scaled down to 2048 px on their long side before they are sent; that is plenty for the model.
Refine — adjust Smoothing, Depth Contrast and Output Resolution in Depth Map Settings. The right-hand picture follows every change.
Create Relief — opens Relief with the map already loaded as an image operation. Or use Save Depth Map to keep the map as a file.

Selecting a new image discards the previous map, so generate again for each picture.

Depth Map Settings

Setting	Range	Default	What it does
Output Resolution	Native · 2K · 4K	Native	The size of the saved map. Native keeps what the model returned; 2K and 4K enlarge it to 2048 or 4096 px on the long side.
Smoothing	0–100	20	Softens the map. At 100 the blur is 1 % of the image’s long side: enough to melt stair-steps without erasing the shapes.
Depth Contrast	0–100	50	Spreads or flattens the depth around mid-gray. 50 leaves it unchanged; 0 compresses it to a quarter; 100 stretches it four times, clipping the extremes.

Smoothing is relative to the image size, so the preview and the full-size result look the same at any resolution.

Reading the map

Move the mouse over either picture: a marker shows the same point on both, and the status line gives the depth there, from 0.00 (farthest) to 1.00 (nearest). Use it to check that the parts you want raised really are lighter than the background.

Output

Create Relief

Create Relief writes the refined map as a PNG and opens ArtisanRelief with it as an Image operation named AI Depth, 3 mm high.

The PNG is saved next to the .3dm. In a document that was never saved it goes to Documents\RhinoArtisan\DepthMaps. Each file carries a date and time stamp, so earlier maps are never overwritten and older Relief operations keep pointing at their own.
In a document without a Relief project, a 50 mm workbench is set up with the photo’s proportions, so the relief fills it.
In a document that already has a Relief project, the map is added to it as one more operation, on the existing workbench.

From there it is a normal Relief project: set the real height in millimetres, clip it with curves, stack a Profile under it, and choose Mesh, Thickness or Flat base as output. See Relief.

Save Depth Map

Save Depth Map writes the map at the chosen output resolution as a 16-bit grayscale PNG, named after the photo (<photo>_depth.png). Use it in another relief later, in CNC software, or anywhere else a height map is accepted.

Tips

Pick photos with one clear subject. A cameo, a coin or a face on a plain background reads cleanly; a busy scene spreads the depth over everything.
Soft, even light works best. Hard shadows and bright reflections can be read as shape.
The map is relative, not in millimetres. It says what is in front of what; the actual height is set in Relief.
Raised parts the wrong way round? Turn on Invert in the Relief image operation.
Clean up after the relief. Relief’s Smooth and Sculpt brushes fix small artefacts locally without generating again.
One generation, many attempts. Try different smoothing and contrast values, and create as many reliefs as you like: none of it calls the AI again.