Hey there, in this video we're going to talk about the reasons that you might want to consider using Relief Maker alongside Aspire. Relief Maker allows you to create height maps and basically reliefs of any 3D model at any angle. Let's talk about the workflow you might use without Relief Maker.

Here we have a pretty basic object and our goal is to put some kind of an object, maybe a skull in our case, inside of this little hole. Maybe we're making a Halloween decoration or something like that. So the workflow that you might use today starts with finding a skull to use.

The first place you might look for something like that is the Design & Make store. You type in skull and you kind of look at all the options. This is the very first problem that Relief Maker solves.

What you see here is exactly what you're constrained to. You are beholden to things that other people have made at a specific angle with a specific style and maybe you find something that you like. But if you want things at different angles you're going to have to buy multiple models.

You may have to buy the same model three or four times if you want it to be facing in different directions for different projects. Maybe the closest thing that is coming to what we want is something like this. So we might buy that and then insert it and then later decide that we wanted a different side angle.

Well now you're kind of out of luck. You can buy it again. That's not a sustainable approach.

Let's look at the workflow with Relief Maker. Here we are inside Relief Maker and we have gone online and searched generally for skull models and we found the perfect model for what we want. This is benefit number one to Relief Maker is you can start with any 3D model.

You don't have to go to a specific store. You can find artist grade models online from a variety of places and use those in your projects. And so we've got a really professional grade 3D model here and maybe our first objective is we just want to create a relief.

And so we're going to orient it how we want and we're going to press generate relief. And it's that simple. Now we're going to go file export relief.

We're going to save it as a 16-bit height map png file and we're going to just call it skull. Now we jump back into Aspire and the question is how do we use this? Well we'll go to a 2D view, model, create component from bitmap. We'll select our skull and it's probably going to come in way too big.

That's okay. We're going to click on it and we're going to drag it down. It's important to note that while you see a bunch of the black stuff, things that are purely black in this case, don't contribute to the relief in any way.

So it's okay if those things overlap. You want to focus on what you can see and in this case that's the white part. So we want to make sure the white part is in the middle and maybe you want to scale it down just a little bit more.

And we'll do some fine tuning of this in the 3D view when we switch back. So we'll left click this and we can kind of move it around and we don't like the default way that it's come in. We want it to be a little bit more prominent.

So we'll click this little arrow and we can raise it just like that. And just like that, I mean in a few seconds, we have gotten the perfect relief that is machinable from the model that we've chosen at the angle that we've chosen. And this is the primary point of Relief Maker.

Incredible creative freedom. Now the second cool thing about Relief Maker is that we're not stuck with this. Maybe we said, you know what, we don't like that angle.

We want something a little bit more dramatic. And so we want it maybe looking from the bottom up. We want a quarter view profile and this is looking way cooler.

So we'll just go back into Relief Maker and load our model again and click Generate Relief. And we'll do the same thing, File, Export. Maybe we'll overwrite the skull and then we'll jump back into Aspire and maybe we just delete this thing and we'll re-import it.

Same process as before. Drag it down, move it over, 3D view and now we can bring it out again. So you see you get absolutely insane creative freedom, number one.

And number two, you can reuse models for lots of different projects. And so if you've got a deer model, you can have it from the front, you can have it from the side, you can be looking down on it, you can combine it with other models. And this brings us to the last and most interesting point, perhaps for some of you, is that because this is so fast and there's never been such an easy way to do this before Relief Maker.

So the idea of being able to offer clients customization services for things like this really wasn't a possibility unless you were going to pay somebody to make a relief for you or you happen to be an insane artist. And even if you are a great artist, doing something like this by hand takes a lot of time. Not anymore.

I mean, you've seen how fast we've created two reliefs inside of a few minutes. You can literally take a client and say, here's seven skull options, which one do you like the best? And then once they pick one, you can say in front of the client, if you want, show me the angle that you think is the coolest. And they may say, oh, this is what I want.

This looks amazing. Okay, great. You're done.

It's that fast. And you can immediately take this and you don't have to show them. You can pretend like this takes a lot of time, but you know, it doesn't, right? So you can offer customization services, you can offer premium builds, and either way you sell it, your projects are going to be absolutely astounding.

So we hope that you incorporate Relief Maker into your Aspire workflows to work alongside their other great tools. And we cannot wait to see what you make.