Coming from knowing nothing about 3D/Bas-Relief, I’ve found the Vectric YouTube tutorials on 3D modeling to be quite helpful. Until going through all of these I really did not understand how much Aspire can do.
There are also a couple of good 3D tutorials by Beki at Vectric from last years Vectric Worldwide:
Specifically, the Trout video goes through creating a 3D from a 2D image.
I tried the Bas-Relief feature in ZBrush when it came out last year. I didn’t have any luck with it, especially the kind of quality of STL’s you have above. Also, with the feature being new there were very few tutorials. Along with the fact that since then ZBrush has been acquired and is becoming a subscription.
There are tools in Blender also, height maps, etc., but that’s another learning curve for me. Not sure I need all that?
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ways to do this also. So far, Aspire is the only tool which I’ve used to create some of my own 3D results with.
Made this one recently - still have some learning to get to your examples above:
