First of all, thank you for your help. Knowing that it was possible has helped me to make more progress, but I’m still not there with carving. Nothing I have carved actually looks completely like what I designed. I think that the issue has to do with a few settings in both my design and Luban. I think that they are mostly depth related. For my tests I have used a 2x4. I designed an object in FreeCad that is basically a cube with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 carved into it. My 2x4 is 38 mm deep and my design is 37 mm deep. In Luban I set my target depth to 35 mm with an allowance of 2 mm. On my SnapMaker I set my work origin to the lower-left corner of the 2x4 on its surface. When I carved, nothing was more than about 2 mm deep. I can think of a number of things that could be wrong, but haven’t found the correct combination yet. It is this shallow cutting that made me wonder about the ability of Luban to do real relief in the first place since it resembles the simple carving of lines that you would get with a 2-d image. However, over the weekend I did carve one deep object, but it also only vaguely resembles the object that I designed. Can you or anyone else suggest what settings I should be using? Maybe I should post this as another topic.
BTW, one other item that I should mention relative to your original answer. I looked at getting Fusion 360 and the only options that I see are as a business user for money or the free student version if I can show that I am using it in class. Is there some other way to get a hobbyist version?
There is a Fusion 360 for personal use license which you have to renew every year:
You can register at this link:
Thank you brvdboss for the Fusion link. i downloaded and installed it, but that opens up a whole new can of worms as far as figuring out how to use it. I was able to load my project in, but in order to print it you need to setup the printer and I do not know enough about my Snapmaker to be sure that all of my settings are correct. I already broke one bit off because I told it to do something that it should not do. Does someone have the Snapmaker device preconfigured?
You mention print, but I’m assuming you mention CNC.
There are some tutorials and some great posts on the forum. Go through those and open a new topic with a specific question when you get stuck. But the forum has a great search function as well. Here are some links to get you started:
There are also some great tutorials on youtube about the use of Fusion360. I’ve learnt a lot from the channel of Winston Moy: