CNC Project: LED Light Art Acrylic Tiger w/Amana Tool Solid Carbide Spiral ’O’ Flute Router Bits

Watch as we create this “Eye of the Tiger” design in 1/8” thick acrylic (plastic) using Amana Tool® industrial solid carbide spiral ‘O’ flute CNC router bits, specifically designed for creating plastic signs, displays and much more. We purchased the tiger image from a stock photography website. The software used to generate the tiger image was a combination of Rhinoceros 5.0 (NURBS modeler) and a plug-in called Grasshopper (a parametric modeler). A grid of points (representing the circle center points) was overlaid on the image. A custom script was written which analyzes the greyscale value of the pixel located at each grid point and we used the greyscale value to control a circle radius that the CNC followed. While this was created with a custom script, this could also be done with free software called Rasterbator to pixelate an image and then using ’live trace’ in Adobe Illustrator to get vectors opposed to raster (there are free versions of Illustrator-equiva