Buddha Relief Free 3D print model

cgtrader

I've spent years mastering lithophanes and now I'm eager to create bas reliefs without the frustration. Although I've got some experience with Blender scripts, that route still seems daunting to me. I stumbled upon black-and-white depth maps which can be turned into decent reliefs when translated as a lithophane. I've used MeshMixer and VisCAM to refine the mesh even further. To showcase this concept, I converted a picture into a Buddha relief you can easily 3D print using this link: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~lizhang/courses/cs766-2008f/projects/phs/students/barnard/results/buddha/depthMap.png Now my main challenge is to find an efficient way to create depth maps that simplify the process.