: Sketchup push/pull images or models I'm using sketchup to create a book cover. I want it to be a wooden cover of about 2 CM thick with 1 CM engraving. It is going to be a bucket-list book.

@Heady304

To get a carved wooden book cover you have a few options.


Carve a piece of wood by hand - which you want to avoid.
Have a machine carve the wood for you. This can be achieved using CAM (computer aided manufacturing) If you have access to a CNC mill then blender cam can help you do that. Chances are you want to find a machine shop nearby that will do it for you and ask them what you need to provide to get the end result.
Print a wooden cover. Wood based filaments are available for 3d printers, the result is basically a mixture of sawdust and glue, something like a sheet of MDF. i.Materialise is currently making wood based products. This is a demonstration of wood printing at home and has links to purchase the materials.

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@Jessie844

Real extruding

If you need a real world engraving, for example to make a 3D print, you must have a clean trace.

3D models need to be extruded from clean shapes with nodes that are not that close from each other, and the shapes need to be closed.

So the options are that you simplify a map in another aplication, probably ilustrator, and try to import from there, but you need the pro version I think. I would remove a lot of the tiny islands that are not that important.

I gave up on importing shapes on Sketchup with the free version some time ago, because I swiched to blender, that makes a good job importing svg. You can later export the extruded shape to 3ds format or whatever format your current version of sketchup can import.

Extruding from bitmaps

This can be done but in blender, and again you can import it back to sketchup.
www.blender.org/manual/modeling/modifiers/deform/displace.html
Simulated extruding

You can use a simple bump map or an displace map on the render engine you are using (if you are using one)

A bump map is a simple grayscale image that gives the height information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_mapping
You can use a 3th party render engine like Kerkythea www.kerkythea.net/cms/ which is free

A demo version of twilight: www.twilightrender.com/ Take a look on the documentation on each program to "conect" the program to sketchup.

If you want to try blender it has all included. www.blender.org/manual/render/cycles/materials/displacement.html

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