I have recently been replaying the video game Celeste, a difficult platformer about a young woman who sets off to climb Celeste Mountain and in doing so is forced to confront her mental struggles. Coincidentally, I was also looking for something to CNC machine for this project, so I decided to cut the mountain and title card from the game:

First I needed to vectorize this image to work with it in Carbide3D. I’ve become relatively adept at this over the course of the semester, and luckily this image had enough contrast and defined lines that enabled Illustrator to vectorize most of it for me. When finished, I had this:

After importing it into Carbide, I decided to use a 1/8″ end mill for the lettering, outside of the mountain, and through cut on the outside. For the details on the mountain, I used a 1/16″ instead. When finished setting up the cuts, it looked like this:

The cuts took about 25 minutes start to finish. It took several attempts, as the retaining tape was not great at sticking the wood to the base, but when it finished it looked great: 

After sanding and wiping down the insides of the cuts to remove any residual sawdust, I decided it would be cool to use a vinyl sticker to spray paint the lettering on the bottom. Since I already had the vectorized image, it was very easy to send it to the vinyl printer in with most of the image covered. The lettering turned out like this:

I decided I liked it so much that I did the same thing with the mountain, spray painting it purple. The end result came out very nicely!

Cost estimate:

Wood: ~$15

Spray Paint: 2 colors, 2 x $8 = $16

CNC Time: 2 hours, ~$40/hr = $80

Total: $111