My first foray into 3D carving will probably be my next to last.
Now don't get me wrong here as it may appear like it was a failure but far from that, the biggest thing was learning to get the setting somewhere near right in Aspire so as to produce something that looked like what you'd want to carve.
My next unfortunate discovery was the estimated time to carve, now this was a bit of a disappointment as even for something small like 200 x 200 mm with two passes for the roughing tool and one pass for the finishing pass is still over three hours, not what I wanted.
So I thought I'd do a small trial just to see what finish I'd get. 100 x 100 mm seemed a good place to start. This first attempt turned out to be a bit shallow in the profile department and in the process it was causing my Z axis stepper to overheat due to the short travel required and the continual reversing of the stepper so I chose not to finish the job completely.
The tools used were a 1/8th round nose for the roughing along the X axis and then an old engraving bit that had a broken tip and been reshaped. It seemd to do the job quite well, it was the fine detail of the fur that was not so good due to the small size of the job.