Relief

Relief builds a 2.5D height field — a rectangular workbench on which every operation adds, subtracts or blends height — and turns it into geometry when you are done. It is how you make a signet crest, a coin-style medal, a textured band, a carved monogram or a filigree pattern without modelling every bump by hand.

The important part is that nothing is destructive. A relief is a project: an ordered stack of operations that stays editable. Move a curve in the document and the relief follows it; change the height of the third operation and only that one recomputes; reorder the stack and the result changes accordingly. The project is stored inside the .3dm, so closing Rhino and reopening the command resumes exactly where you left it.

Opening it

Run ArtisanRelief, or click Relief in the File tab of the ribbon, next to Sculpt. The panel opens with the project stored in the current document, or with an empty one.

If you select closed curves before running the command, they are picked up as the input of the first operation you add.

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The workbench and the project

Everything is computed on a rectangular grid — the workbench — that sits on a plane, with heights measured along its normal. Open Project Settings (in the Advanced section at the bottom of the panel) to set it up:

• Width / Height — the size of the workbench in millimetres. Default 50 × 50.
• Resolution — grid nodes along the longer side: 512, 1024 or 2048. Cells are always square. Higher resolution means finer detail and heavier computation, so work at 512–1024 and raise it for the final result.
• Output — what the command builds:
  • Mesh — the relief surface on its own, open.
  • Thickness — a closed solid: the relief plus a base offset below it, ready for 3D printing or for a boolean.
• Cap Distance — how far below the relief that base sits, in millimetres.
• Delete Base — leaves out the flat bottom face.
• Workbench — the plane the grid lives on. Set it to World XY, to the Active CPlane, or place it by hand with Pick Center and Pick Area.

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The operation stack

The Operations section is the project itself: a list of cards, computed from top to bottom, each one contributing height to the field.

Add an operation with the buttons at the top of the panel:

Operation	What it does
Profile	The classic puffing: closed curves filled with a height profile that runs from the edge inwards. Monograms, cabochon-like domes, leaf shapes.
Extrude	Closed curves raised to a constant height — a flat plateau with vertical walls. Negative height engraves instead.
Image	A grayscale image drives the height: white is highest, black is lowest. Photos, logos, scanned engravings.
Texture	A tileable texture from the Textures 3D library, repeated over the workbench: knurls, hammering, fabric, guilloché.
Geometry	Existing document objects (meshes, breps, extrusions, SubDs) projected top-down; their height above the plane becomes the relief.
Sculpt	Freehand brush strokes that add or remove height where you paint.
Smooth	A painted blur: softens everything below it in the stack, only where you brush.

Each card carries its colour, its index, its name and a summary of its parameters, plus four buttons: visibility (compute it or skip it), edit, duplicate and delete. Below the list, Move up / Move down reorder the selected operation — which matters, because combine modes are applied in order — and Hide / Show toggles the live preview in the viewport.

Editing an operation

Click a card’s edit button and the panel switches to that operation’s parameters. Change what you need and confirm with ✓, or discard with ✕. The preview updates as you type.

Operations driven by curves or objects stay live-linked to the document: they reference the geometry by id, so editing or moving a curve updates the relief on the next recompute. If you delete the referenced geometry the operation is flagged as broken and skipped — nothing crashes, and re-picking the curves brings it back.

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Parameters by operation

Profile

The classic “inflate” operation: closed curves are filled with a cross-section evaluated over the distance to the curve edge.

• Profile — the cross-section shape. Four presets ship with RhinoArtisan:
  • Round — quarter circle: vertical takeoff at the edge, flat at the centre.
  • Chamfer — a straight 45° slope.
  • Smooth — tangent at both ends, the classic pillow.
  • Plateau — rises over the first stretch and then stays flat.
• Edit — opens the Profile Editor to draw your own.
• Inflate — how the profile spans the shape:
  • Inflate — stretched so it peaks exactly at the deepest point inside the curves, whatever their width.
  • Fixed Width — the profile spans a set distance from the edge inwards, and stays flat beyond it.
• Height (mm) — peak height added on top of the starting height.
• Profile Width (mm) — the span used by Fixed Width.
• Starting Height (mm) — Z offset where the profile takes off, so a shape can start from an existing plateau.
• Feather (mm) — blend distance at the mask edge; 0 is a hard edge.

Extrude

• Height (mm) — extrusion height. Negative values engrave.
• Feather (mm) — softens the wall over that distance, which also lets the combine modes blend the border into what is underneath.

Image

• Load Image — picks the file (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .tif, .tiff). The image is referenced by path, so editing it outside Rhino and recomputing brings the new version in.
• Height (mm) — the height that pure white reaches.
• Invert — flips the mapping, so black becomes the high point.
• Scale — multiplier over the fitted size.

With no curves selected the image is centred on the workbench keeping its aspect ratio. If you select closed curves when adding it, the image fits their bounding box and is clipped to their interior — which is how you drop a photo inside a medal outline.

Texture

• Texture — picked from the Textures 3D library.
• Height (mm) — height at pure white.
• Tiles U / Tiles V — how many times the texture repeats across the workbench.
• Invert — flips high and low.

As with images, referenced closed curves clip the texture to their interior.

Geometry

• Pick the objects — meshes, breps, extrusions or SubDs — and their height above the workbench plane becomes the relief.
• Feather (mm) — blend distance at the silhouette edge.

Sculpt

Freehand detailing, painted directly on the relief in the viewport.

• Radius — brush size in millimetres.
• Strength — how much each pass adds.
• Hold Ctrl while painting to invert the brush and carve instead of raise.

Strokes live inside the operation, so a sculpt stays editable, reorderable and combinable like any other layer. Use Undo stroke / Redo stroke in the panel header to step through strokes.

Smooth

The same brush, but instead of adding height it paints a smoothing mask: everything below this operation in the stack gets blurred where you painted.

• Radius / Strength — the brush, as above.
• Smooth Radius (mm) — how wide the blur kernel is.

Because it filters what is underneath, its position in the stack matters: put it last to soften the whole relief, or in the middle to soften only the operations below it.

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Combine modes

Every operation merges into the field with a rule, chosen in the Combine dropdown. The operation’s mask always attenuates the effect, so a feathered edge blends smoothly in any mode.

Mode	Result
Add	Heights are added — the default, and what you want for stacking detail.
Subtract	Heights are subtracted: the operation carves into what is below.
Union Highest	Keeps whichever is taller, the operation or what is underneath.
Union Lowest	Keeps whichever is lower.
Absolute	No merge: the operation’s heights replace what is underneath, inside its mask.
Multiply	Heights are multiplied — the operation modulates an existing relief, which is how you fade a texture over a dome.

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Profile Editor

Edit, next to the profile dropdown of a Profile operation, opens the editor where the cross-section is drawn by hand.

• Click on the graph adds a point, drag moves it, right-click deletes it.
• The left edge of the graph is the curve edge; the right edge is the deepest point inside the shape.
• Smooth interpolates the points with a smooth curve; unchecked, they are joined by straight segments.
• Give it a Name and click Save to add it to Saved Profiles — your library, kept in the RhinoArtisan user folder and available in every project. Delete removes the selected saved profile.

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Finishing the relief

The panel previews the relief live in the viewport while you work, at a reduced resolution so editing stays fluid. When the stack is right:

• Accept recomputes the project at full resolution and adds the result to the document — a mesh, or a closed solid, depending on the Output setting. The project stays saved in the file, so you can run the command again later, adjust an operation and build a new version.
• Export Heightmap (TIFF 16-bit), in the Advanced section, writes the height field as a 16-bit grayscale TIFF — for CNC, for external software, or as the input image of another relief.

Tips

• Start from the outline. A Profile operation on the piece’s silhouette gives the base dome; everything else — texture, lettering, sculpted detail — stacks on top of it.
• Feather is what makes it look cast, not cut. A fraction of a millimetre on the edges removes the digital step and lets the operation blend with the rest.
• Use Multiply to tame a texture. A knurl at full height over a whole band is noise; multiplied by a soft profile it fades towards the edges like real hand-work.
• Keep the curves in the document. They stay linked, so refining the outline later refines the relief — no need to rebuild the operation.
• Relief and Sculpt complement each other. Relief gives you a controlled, parametric 2.5D result; Sculpt works the mesh freely in 3D afterwards.