In order to avoid the waste of materials in the traditional manufacturing of metal bas-reliefs via carving and to implement rapid manufacturing,a method of directly manufacturing metal bas-reliefs from images is proposed based on the selective laser melting ( SLM) . As the current bas-relief design software is insufficient for SLM,software is programmed by using the Visualization Toolkit ( VTK) and the Scanning Path Generation Library ( SPGL) ,which has such main functions as 3D bas-relief modeling,bas-relief model slicing,scanning path generating and processing code generating,and can generate the processing codes of a SLM device from images directly. Moreover,a direct manufacturing process of hollow bas-relief is investigated to reduce the material consumption and take advantage of the layered manufacturing of SLM. Experimental results on a SLM device using 316L stainless steel powder show that the proposed method is feasible.