Lithophanes - Litho what?

[Redbrickman]

I'd never heard of Lithophanes but now that I'm researching for my first 3D printer I came across this today and it's on my project list for sure It's a perfect project for this community since it combines photos and 3D printing

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1370792

See the bottom of the linked page for details of software and designing the "prints".

Personally I blame The Hat for starting me down this road but there is no turning back now

 

[The Hat]

Personally I blame The Hat for starting me down this road but there is no turning back now

Have you ever tried turning back in 3D...?

 

[Nifty]

Great timing! I printed one of these yesterday. Took 3 hours. It turned out ok, but I realized I should have reversed the colors because when I show a light through it, it is in the negative

I also got some really weird artifacts in it, so I may either need to clean up the print manually before importing it, or use a different image.

 

[Redbrickman]

I think from reading more that the choice of image can be quite critical as far as the end result goes.

 

[Nifty]

My first two were negative and had artifacts. This one turned out half decent:

(me and my girlfriend)

 

[Redbrickman]

That's pretty nice quality, I expect it is rather hit and miss and is very hard to know from the photo how good it will actually print and illuminate.

 

[stratman]

I also got some really weird artifacts in it

From the instruction link posted by Red... Could this have anything to do with it?

If your printer has an SD card reader, then use it instead of using the USB connection to print your model. This is because the print may have a lot of details on some layers and the USB connection may not be fast enough to send all the G-code to the printer so it will start taking pauses while it's receiving the G-code over USB, these small pauses will leave blobs of filament (oozing) in the print that will affect the quality of the overall result.

 

[Nifty]

Could this have anything to do with it?

In this case, it was due to the printer trying to duplicate some of the dark background bits. Removing the background cleared that up.