Beginner’s Guide to 3D printing Lithophanes (Also tips and Tricks!)

welcome back everybody to desktop inventions now today we're going to be going over how to make lithophane 3d prints and if you've never heard of these little pieces of plastic before let me show you why lithophanes are so awesome and prepare to be amazed in three two one [Music] so let me explain how lithophanes work with a very basic example so in this 3d print i have my logo printed out here and the letters are thick while the background is much thinner so what happens when we turn a backlight on is the letters appear to be darker and the background appears to be lighter and that's because the thin material allows more light to come through and the thicker letters don't allow as much light to come through now that you understand exactly how these lithophanes work let me show you a 30 second quick guide on just how easy it is to make these so you can make them yourself step 1 take a photo step 2 upload your photo to lithofanmaker.com crop and export your photo step 3. import the model to the slicing software and slice the model step 4 transfer the file over to your 3d printer get the print started and then wait for your print to be complete and finally go grab your 3d print get through the fun depaneling process and then take your 3d print over to a window and prepare to be amazed so that was the quick part of the video and now is the part where i teach you all the fine details on how to make your lithophanes amazing so we'll start out at lithafinmaker.com and we're going to scroll down and click on the part that says flat lithophane maker and that brings us to the starting page here where we can adjust the parameters here we will click the choose file button and go ahead and find the first picture that you want to start off with and open that and the first prompt you'll run into is the frame option and you can see there's six different options here and to better show you these different frame options i've exported the same photo six different times into kira the slicing software so let's have a look and the first option here is just a standard border all around the picture and keep in mind you can adjust the size of this border which we'll look at in a little bit now the second frame option is very similar to the first except they've added these two twin tunnels in the corners so basically you can use a rope or twine to hang your photo from those and now the third option here is called the hook tab and this one's just a little tab with a hole on the top so you can hang this on a nail on the wall or by a string and the fourth option here is no border so this means the picture will take up the full size that you choose with no border if you choose this option keep in mind there are no mounting features so you'll have to work around that and the fifth option here is similar to the fourth there's no border but it does come with a triangular mounting stand and you can adjust the size and the angle of that stand so this one will stand up on its own and the last option here is very similar to the first except it will punch a hole in your picture in the top left corner and you can hang that on a key chain or a rope and that's all for the frame options i usually choose the first but it's completely up to you and your preferences the next thing we'll look at is lithophane resolution and basically this is how course or how fine this website cuts up your image and exports it as a 3d model so essentially the larger the number the worse and the smaller the number the better to an extent and to demonstrate this i've taken a smaller photo at four different resolutions and export it four different times so you can see that here in the 3d software and comparing the point four millimeter on the left and the point two millimeter on the right can basically see the point four millimeter looks more blurry the point two millimeter is more defined similarly on the 0.2 and 0.1 millimeter resolution you can see more definition on the 0.1 millimeter you can see a lot more pointy peaks and the 0.05 millimeter takes that to a whole new level with even smaller and even more pointy peaks but our 3d printer cannot actually print all these peaks so let's print it out and see how the difference actually looks okay we've got these four different resolutions printed out and without a backlight a little bit hard to see the difference now let's get some light on these photos and take a closer look at the differences so it's very clear to tell right away the differences between the first and the second image the first image is looking a little bit blurry there and then looking at the difference between the second and the third image can see even more detail coming out in the third image especially in the head area and then from the third to the fourth image i was not able to tell any difference there they look completely identical to me one more cautionary note on resolution the smaller the resolution the larger the file size so 0.4 millimeter resolution was about 6 megabytes 0.2 millimeter was about 26 megabyte file size and 0.1 millimeter was 106 megabyte file size and it's an exponential function so it gets pretty crazy from there and eventually the website just crashes on you so all in all i would say the 0.2 millimeter default size is pretty good you can get a little bit more detail with a 0.1 millimeter with that trade-off of a larger file size but anything beyond that is not really worth it for my opinion now that we're finished talking about resolution let's talk about resolution layer height resolution that is on your 3d printing slicing software you can also change the layer height or the height between each layer of your 3d print and this can also have a big impact on the image quality so let's take a look at that and to better demonstrate this i printed out the same four images this time at a point one two millimeter layer height previously it was done at a point two millimeter layer height comparing from the top pictures to the bottom pictures we can see the bottom is a little bit more clear and crisp and these photos here you can definitely see it in the head area and in theory here our bottom right most picture should be our most clean and crisp looking photo but i cannot see much difference between that and the one next to it can you see the difference and the trade-off for smaller layer height would be increased time on a standard three by four inch or 80 by 120 millimeter photo i'll generally print it in five hours at 0.2 millimeter layer height but changing the 0.1 millimeter layer height doubles that to 10 hours so 0.2 millimeter layer height will give you some great photos but you can get even better with smaller layer heights just the trade-off there is your time so it's up to you and next is just looking at the basic size parameters of your picture frame so the width the height and the depth and the website is very intuitive it will scale things accordingly i generally print at 120 millimeter width 80 millimeter height and 7.5 millimeter depth and the next parameters are base height and overhang angle which controls the size of your border and the angle of the border we'll come back to this later as it affects the support material next is the maximum and minimum thickness of the picture i generally don't mess with these the default settings are really good if you go too thin you may end up with holes in your picture and these grayed out boxes here just if you choose the no border and print stand option if so you can adjust the size and shape of that here in the image preview you can see a small box of what you'll be printing and you can use the x shift to adjust that left and right the y shift to adjust that up and down and then you can adjust the scale if you want to make it bigger or smaller and these two boxes here will estimate the run time for the website to create the file and the size of the file and the last step input email address hit create stl file and your download will start so now that you have your file download it's time to move on to the slicing software so you can use kira prusa or any slicing software to do this now that you've got the model pulled into your slicing software your first question might be should i print this lying down or standing up and while it may be tempting to print it lying down to save some time and save some material actually you should almost always print it standing up so in order to show you why you should print it standing up i've taken the same photo and i printed it in both ways and in this photo which is printed standing up you can see some of the layer lines there due to a loose extruder head but other than that looks pretty good now compare that to this photo here that was printed lying down you can see blotchiness all over the picture and this is why i would not recommend printing the photo lying down so now let's take a look at support material for lithophane prints there's generally three methods you can do for support material one would be no support material two would be support material where needed and three would be a full sheet of support material for your lithophane picture so now let's take a look at all three types of support material in action so first let's look at no support material and this is very simple there's no de-paneling necessary so it's very easy but there can be some risk associated with this if you do have some severe overhangs in your print now if we compare that to only randomly having support material where needed after the print is done you'll have to hold up to the light to find all the little support material and try and peel all of them out sometimes it's difficult to pull out and you cannot find all of them if you print with a full sheet of support material on the face it's pretty easy to de-panel simply cut the top and the bottom edge and then pry that support material out of there so my recommendation for support material would be either go all the way with a full sheet or nothing at all do not go in between or you will have a bad time in most cases you'll be just fine with no support material but if you do have a print that has some pretty severe overhangs and you're unsure about it you can always go with a full sheet of support material another critical thing to ensure when printing lithophanes is make sure there's no hollow voids in the middle of your photo and there's two different ways to ensure this one is to look at your wall line count setting under your shell settings and make sure that's set to a value of at least four and the second way you can ensure this is to set your infill density to one hundred percent so everything in the photo including the border will be infilled completely both ways work just fine you might save a little bit of print time if you go to a wall line count four but if you have a strong light source from behind you might get some bleed through and see the support structure on the inside of the borders there another tip when printing since the surface area in the bottom is so small tend to have some bed adhesion issues i had to stop this print because the bottom here was curling up away from the bed what i like to do on these prints is add a raft on the bottom of the prints just like this you can see with the raft it's very nice because it's very easy to just tear away and you get a nice smooth edge on the bottom adding a brim to your part will also help improve the adhesion but i personally think working with brims is painful they are fused into the first layer of the print so they do not tear away very easily and then you have to try and cut them away with a knife which is never that clean and always leaves burrs and brims are just a headache another question people ask me sometimes is can you print in other colors and the answer is yes here's a photo i printed in a blue color it definitely has a different feel to it and it's not as authentic as the white color in my opinion but you certainly can do it in addition there are filaments specifically for 3d printing lithophanes just like the one that can be seen on lithofanmaker.com and if you want to support that website you can purchase some of that filament there okay now that we've learned all of our tips and tricks we're going to take everything we've learned and apply it to two different pictures so we can see the differences so first we'll have picture a which will feature 0.2 millimeter resolution 0.2 millimeter layer height the full front sheet support material and the four layer wall count and we'll be taking and comparing that to picture b which will be 0.1 millimeter pixel resolution 0.12 millimeter layer height no support material 100 infill so without further ado let's get started so here's picture a looking pretty solid you can see the borders are bleeding through a little bit there and here's picture b looking a lot better more clear and defined on a lot of the faces now let's take an up close look at picture a there's a few faces very blurry cannot tell who they are and over to picture b things are a lot more clear and crisp now we're far from perfect but i think there's a lot of improvements made with these settings that we have changed alright so that's going to wrap up the video today on lithofan 3d printing i've had a lot of trial and error along the way and i hope i can pass on some of my experiences onto you so you don't have to make the same mistakes in the future as usual if you have any questions leave them in the comment section down below and i'll do my best to answer those till then see you next time on desktop inventions

Channel: Desktop Inventions

Views: 100,707

Keywords: Lithophanes, 3D printing, desktop inventions, 3D printing lithophanes, christmas gift, christmas idea, 3D printed christmas gift, christmas 3D print, Lithophane guide, tips and tricks, 3D printed picture, 3D printed pictures

Id: haZyRS0yHac

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021