Lithophanes have become very popular at the local library,

3D Printing
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1

Lithophanes have become very popular at the local library, but so far I have not found a stable software to generate them. The best I found was the 3dp.rocks web based tool, which completely fails on STLs larger than 100mb. I’m looking for something with as much functionality (borders, depth, and shapes), in an easy to use GUI that a 8 year old kid can use. Speed is a concern, but it needs to scale to do very large and detailed images as well.

Does such a unicorn exist? I’ve been searching for quite a while without any luck.

2

Have you tried Cura’s built-in support for lithopane? I’m not sure of its featureset…

3

Simplify3D also has a built-in tool for image treatment. Never tried on very large image but it does a very reasonable job on regular one.

4

I’ve used OpenSCAD to create a lithophane, but the resultant STL file was rather large and would have required some massaging to get it to a reasonable size (triangles, megabytes, etc) so I jumped back to 3dp as you noted. I can’t recall which method I used, but a quick Google search for OpenSCAD lithophane provides many results.

5

Cura is missing a lot of functionality like borders, shapes, etc.
Simplify 3d costs money.
Openscad is crazy slow on anything above 200x200px, and an 8 year old is not going to be using it.

6

I have a Python program that wraps a lithopane around the inside of an egg - but that’s pretty far from a GUI…

7

I was thinking about doing something in python, but honestly I know nothing of designing 3d cad.

8

STL files are trivial to emit via python - I figured it out from the Wikipedia page:

You just need to make sure to wind the trianges’ points counter-clockwise to their outward face, and set ‘normal’ in the STL to (0,0,0), and most slicers will be able to handle it.

Try making a STL tetrahedron in python, then work out from there.

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The more difficult part is creating a gui, and rendering it.

10

Numpy to the rescue!

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@Joseph_Larson 's YouTube tut. on lithophanes using Blender. Which, I assume, you can write a python script for.

12

I use this one (although missing “Bells and Whistles” )

It does a really nice job. I use 1mm base, 3 or 4mm target, and Drop Max res to .05 (i think)
Super easy to use and open source.

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We built a very robust tool at PrintToPeer for lithophanes for a crowdsourced sculpture that we made. The backend was using blender with python and a displacement map. Worked like a charm!