Create Stunning Lithophanes with 3D Printing: A Step-by-Step Guide

in this video we'll learn to create lithophanes by taking a simple photograph and turning it into a printable file that we send to a 3D printer which will produce a thin plastic sheet which illuminates when lit from behind a lithophane is a thin plaque of translucent material which has been molded to varying thicknesses such that when lit from behind the different thicknesses show as different shades forming an image originally made out of plaster they were invented in the 19th century and became popular in their use as Night Lights lamp shades or window hangings today we're going to learn how to build our own lithopane file that will be send to a 3D printer to be created for today's example I'm going to use this image of Bill Murray the Dog that's Bill Murray on the left there are a few things we can do to make this image a bit cleaner and that will give us a more successful lithopane so I'm going to open it up in Photoshop and the first thing I'm going to do is turn this background into an editable layer by double clicking on it the next thing I'm going to want to do is come over here to my object selection tool and if we choose the first of the drop downs we'll see that it automatically starts highlighting things that it thinks are an object so we'll click on Bill Murray the Dog and then what we want to do is kind of get rid of everything else around Bill Murray and so in order to do this come up to select and hit inverse and push delete this gets rid of all of the rest of the image and I'm going to hit command d a shortcut for D select we're going to add another layer and this one we're going to fill with just white go to edit fill white we can move that layer down below so now Bill Murray is on top now that we have Bill Murray on top of this white layer we want to see if there's anything that needs to be cleaned up and the only thing I can spot that's really out of line is this little tiny shark fin on his hair so I'm going to move over here to my magnetic lasso tool and just kind of run it along his neck making sure to select that shark tail and hit delete there we go that's about as good as I need it for today the other thing we want to do is try and boost the contrast just a bit because the more contrast we can find here the more detail will come out one way to help visualize this is to come up to our image mode and turn it into grayscale this allows us to see what we will see more or less when we're looking at the lithophane with light behind it so if you think that it's a little bit too uniform you can come to brightness contrast and just lighten up the light areas and bring your contrast up a little bit great now I'm ready to save my file and we'll move on to the next step next we're going to open up a website called its litho it's litho is just one of many options that will help you make your litho Fane and this one makes it particularly easy so once we're on its lio.com we're just going to click get started our first step is to move over here to the upload panel and upload that image of Murray next Once I click on Murray done I'm going to move over to my model panel and we'll see that Murray is already popping up right where we want him so if we zoom in a bit the first thing we're going to notice sorry about that is that the quality is quite bad so don't be alarmed this is not the first thing we notice when we zoom into this image is that the image quality seems to have deteriorated considerably this is not how it's going to print this is really just a a model setting so in order to keep the file size low they automatically have your lithopane preview model set to low so that it's a smaller file that can be moved around but if we move it up to high or even native resolution suddenly we're working with an image that's much closer to what we had uploaded when it prints it's always going to print at this native resolution so for now we can move it back down to low in order to work around it a bit easier some other qualities that you're going to see here are your shape qualities and if I zoom out a little bit the zoom is really finicky you can see from this drop down that we have all these different options of things we might want to print you can turn it into a plane which is what we started at a cylinder which will morph our dog all the way around I suppose you could put a light inside this you might want to go for something like an arc which gives it a little bit of a Bend so that you could put a light behind it but for today we're going to go with a simple Circle a few things that you notice about this circle is that this white area around here don't be alarmed by it the reason that I cut all that out in Photoshop is that it's actually going to illuminate the detail of Bill Murray's face considerably so all of these settings here I'm going to leave at their maximum I mean sorry at their default and just let them be what I really want to work on tweaking is my frame you have the option to do a border a frame or none and because we're printing a circle it's going to need some support so if we put a thick border around it or frame it's going to really offer a bit more support in the printing process when the printer is moving across printing each one of our slices so I'm going to keep the frame I'm going to turn the thickness down a little bit though maybe to two something and I'm going to turn the angle and depth down I want more of my image than I want of the frame as we already saw in our quality options um we're going to leave this millimeter per pixel1 because that's what we're going to ultimately print at in our attributes we have the possibility to enable a little hook which means someone could hang it possibly on a window or from a tree our model options again don't really matter because they're really just about how we're seeing this model right now so we can skip over those but our image options are important and in particular I want to think about where Bill Murray sits here and I want him to be a lot bigger so I'm going to zoom him in not that much I actually want to pretty much cut off all of the part to the right where Murray is sitting next to another dog I think that's working pretty well once our settings are in place and we're happy with the image we're going to download this STL file it's litho will automatically make an STL file which is what we're going to need for the next step I'm going to say download lithophane and save it to my desktop so the next step is to take our sdl file and move it into ultimaker Cura Cura is a slicing software that was created by ultimaker and it's free and easy to download on the internet so once we open up ultimaker Cura we're going to go file open files from here we're going to select the STL file that we just made you'll notice a few things when it starts to open one is that it's yellow and red and in some spots this is nothing to be alarmed about it's not going to print this way it's going to print in whatever color filament we load into the 3D printer this is just ultimaker's color coding and it allows us to see what ultimaker Cura considers trouble spots like this red overhang and those are just pointing out to us the overhang areas that it suspects might be a problem um we don't need to worry about them right now because we don't have that much of an overhang the next thing you'll probably notice is that it's standing upright and it'd be easy to suspect that we could just lay this down on the printing bed and have it print face down or face up as it were uh but ultimately we want the quality of the image to be as high as possible that's what makes these lithophanes so effective and the printer is better at capturing that quality if it prints upright and the third is that it lines itself along on this y AIS so it's lined up along this green line here and we want it that way um the printer itself is able to get the most Clarity for an image like this on the Y AIS so now that it's in here there are quite a few things we can do to control it and manipulate it um over here on the left menu bar we can go to our move tool and move it around and this is especially helpful if we have multiple pieces that we're going to print at the same time we also have a scale where we can enlarge it and you'll notice that it always shrinks uh shrinks or enlarges and then drops down onto the print bed which is wonderful if you go too large you'll notice that it turns yellow and gray striped and so it's a little bit of a hazard um warning for us so we don't want it to be that large and another thing to keep in in in mind when making scal adjustments is that it doesn't have a lot to support it so it doesn't have anything on the back or the front it's going to be pretty narrow and therefore we don't want it to be too big because it's going to invite problems one when the printer is working so by keeping it to a relatively small scale will have better success now that we have the lithopane in place we want to look over here at this menu bar so there are a lot of defaults that will happen um here and some of them we like and some we want to get rid of and change so the first default is that right now it's set to fine .1 mm and we want to keep that uh right here in our quality that's issued here 0.1 mm and that's the layer of the slices uh the slices are the layers which the 3D printer is sent to determine where and when and how much of the filament to place in an area if if we go to a a finer quality like extra fine it's going to go a lot slower but it also is going to be a lot more detailed and if we go to a normal quality it's going to be a lot faster but also it's going to lose some detail so right about 0.1 is is a nice sweet spot as well we want to look at the infill automatically the infill density is set to 20 and that's because like this little icon you can see here for the parts that are solid there's really no need to infill them completely there's no need for them to be solid when they can have a structurally sound level of infill and you wouldn't see it anyway but in this case what we're looking for is for light to pass through the lithophane and in order to light for light to pass through and change the shading and the value we really need it to be as solid as possible so it'd be tempting to put it at 100 but putting it at 99 is is kind of The Sweet Spot it's almost at 100 but sometimes the printer can have trouble with 100 as far as the infill pattern we want to move it to grids when it comes to material we're we already know what material we we have because it's this machine only takes one material so we don't have to worry about that by the way if you don't see and some of these dropdowns you can always click on this slider button and it will bring up some preferences that allow you to include and exclude whatever settings that you want to see so if you're not seeing things like infill density you can come over to the slider bring this preferences up and you can click on it the next thing we want to look at is speed speed is normally set for a program like this at 50 um the speed is also going to affect the quality and so although we're going to change this to 20 and that means it's going to be a lot slower it's also means that it's going to have a lot higher quality resolution and the next we want to worry about is support so we're going to say generate support and it's going to bring about a few options here uh the first is struct uh support structure or structure support we want it to be normal not Tree in terms of support placement we want it touching build plate in terms of support overhang angle this is what determines um how essentially let's look over here our supports are what's going to hold it upright while it's printing and we can see that if this was the only part that's touching the build plate it's going to have a lot a lot of trouble creating this overhang and I by overhang I mean all of this space that's not touching the build plate and our support essentially creates a triangle Le here that helps to literally support our lithopane and with our support overhang angle as you can see here um at 0% all overhangs are supported at 90 none will be so I'm going to change this to 10% so that anything that is and you'll notice that yes my um red has changed because they're now highlighting those support areas um it's essentially going to allow anything over a 10° angle to achieve some support and instead of zigzag I'm going to go with concentric um I'm not going to change any of these other settings these are all great except with one exception which is used Towers towers are supports that Cura wants to make to help things stand upright and those are really wonderful in some applications but if you imagine a tower that's going to support all of these little red dots then it's going to be essentially a support that's adhered to our image face and it's going to be impossible to get off and it's going to kind of ruin our lithophane so we're going to turn off used towers and lastly we're going to do build plate adhesion there are three adhesion types that are common within a 3D print one is a brim one is a skirt and one is a raft and in this case we want to go with Brim which means it's going to create a large layer or well relatively large layer around the face that's going to help support all of the main material that grows up out of it and so I'm going to continue to keep this at uh 250 mm length but then on brim width I'm going to change that to 10 just to make it a bit wider now that we have our settings in place all we have to do is hit slice and slowly but surely it will slice up our STL file and turn it into a file that the ultimaker can read so now it has been sliced it tells us it's this lithopane will take 13 hours approximately to print and that's about normal we're going to say save to disk and we want to make sure that G-Code is selected so ultimaker 2+ only accepts G-Code and that's something you can just check out on your 3D printing machine will tell you what kind of files it accepts so we're going to say save and we're good to go so now we can take this G-Code file and transfer it over to the printer and it can begin printing

Channel: Paint Party

Views: 7,602

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Id: WtyEj0633IY

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023