Easy lithophane in Blender for 3d printing

hello today I'm going to show you how to make a photograph lamp or what is usually called a lithophane and we'll do this using blender if you've never seen a lithophane before it is basically a thin plane sphere box or anything really with a photo or image set into it in such a way that when you shine a light on the back the photo shows through rather pleasingly now lithophanes are usually done using specialized websites which do a great job but in blender they're really easy to make and they have the advantage of allowing you to do them on any shape you'd like so here we are at the default blender start screen and the first thing we need to do is to delete this Cube so select the cube press X and delete now you can start with anything flat at all but I'm going to start with a grid so add mesh grid now if we look in the N panel which you get to by pressing n and go to the item tab we can see in the dimensions how big this is and we can see it's sort of 2 mm Square which is pretty small to be honest unless you have a really really small printer so I'm going to scale this up by making sure it's selected I'll press s and drag and I'll look in the dimensions to see when it gets to 200 alternatively I can just change these to 200 now in order to put a photograph on here we're going to need quite a bit of geometry and if I go into edit mode with tab you can see there actually isn't that much geometry so we'll need to add some more and the way I'm going to do that is to go into the modifiers tab over here add a modifier generate and subdivision surface and increase the resolution by increasing this levels viewport button here up to say six now you can see that it's curved to the corners and you might want that in which case just keep it but I don't so I'm going to change to simple in the subdivision surface modifier over here that adds the same amount of geometry but it doesn't do any of the smoothing normally associated with the subdivision surface modifier okay so now we have this we now want to add the photograph to our grid and we do that with a displace modifier so let's add a displace modifier add modifier deform displace so now we want to add a photograph to our displace modifier and we do that by pressing the button marked new here and then once we've done that this funny little icon over on the right here and this takes us to the texture section of our displacement and this is the preview of our texture which is nothing at the moment so we're now going to open a new texture and that's going to be an image here we click on open and then we navigate to where our pictures are now your picture should be high contrast if possible and not cluttered if it's really cluttered it's going to be to see you want something clean and as simple as you can and for that I'm going to use my cat click on open image and here's my cat over here by default I have the source as udm tiles and this isn't a udm tile so I'm going to change this to a single image and now you can see what's happened to the model it looks quite nasty really but we need to go back to our displacement modifier and we need to change the coordinates to UV so let's look at our model it looks a little bit like that cat to be honest but only a little bit like it now the reason it looks like this is because the strength is too much so we can adjust the strength over here in our displace modifier and the strength slider if I move that you can see it changes the amount of displacement if you hold the shift key down you can get more precise control now for a lithophane what you need is for the white parts of your photograph be inser into the model and the dark parts to be sticking out and if I zoom in on this foot which I know is white I can see it's sticking out quite a lot so I'm going to change the strength until it is whoops wrong way until it is inset into the model and not too much otherwise we will end up with overhangs and when we 3D print it there'll be supports all over the place and you don't want that so this looks about okay should get away with that now as you can see cat is a little bit squashed on the x-axis and that's because the aspect ratio of the photograph doesn't match the aspect ratio of the square grid that we made so there are two ways of fixing this three ways if we include just scaling the model and that might work let's try out s x uh that would work fine if you were happy with just scaling the Grid or plane or whatever it is you're using um but I'm not let's assume we need this Square there are two ways to adjust the photograph and stretch the photograph we have here I will show you the basically simple way after the best way and the best way is to use UV editing it's not difficult it's quite easy um so don't be you don't need to be F of it what we will do is we will go into UV editing mode you would either have a UV editing option up here or it may be an option under here but for me we're going to UV editing mode here and our model our grid in edit mode is over here on the right hand side and this section over here represents the texture that we are using and now our texture in this case is a photograph just pop into edit mode over here with tab you can see that the image is there but you can't see anything on the left hand pane here because you can only really adjust the texture or photograph whilst in edit mode so what what do we want to do with this we really just want to stretch this on the X so if I go back into edit mode and then move my mouse over to the left Pane and press a I have selected all the points that represent parts of the texture or photograph in this case and this area here can be rotated moved scaled just like anything in blender so I'm actually going to scale this along the XA axis and hopefully it will stretch our texture so let's do that s x I'll scale it wrong way there you go now let's have a look back on the right hand side here go into object mode that's odd It's Made It smaller now I don't know why this is I haven't really worked it out and I don't really care but the operations you do scaling and rotating on this left hand pane are kind of in opposite of what you want to do so for example if I want to scale this on the X and make it bigger scale X I have to actually make this smaller like that and then we go to the right hand pane go to edit mode yeah but there is a problem here now cat's tail is missing so really we want to scale the whole image down go back to edit mode go here scale with s and to make it smaller we actually have to make this bigger go back into the right hand pane go into object mode and there you go now now this is nearly okay but we want to move the cat a little bit to the left edit mode grab with G and move it a little bit to the right go back in here press t there you go catch to the right now we have some stuff on the top and the bottom if you're interested in why we have some of the image up here that can be explained by going into our displacement modifier clicking on here and you'll see under mapping we have extension rep so it's repeating this image I change that to clip it's only one image and we get bars and the at the top on the bottom now this is basically okay you could print it like this but what I'm going to do is go into edit mode with tab select these vertices and select these vertices just delete them with X vertices tab there we go this is pretty much making the cat look quite nice and normal now so I'm going to go back into my normal layout mode and we're back here again I did promise I'd show you another way of doing this and we had a little blue just now if we go click this little funny icon in our display modifier again and go down to mapping select mapping and then under crop we have these maximum XY and minimum XY sliders here now you can use this with the shift key held down to get some Precision to stretch and move the image in here too now I don't think this is as precise but you can do it this way I should just reset this obviously in order to print this we're going to have to give it some thickness now for me the simple way to do this is to go into edit mode and extrude E now it is already constrain to The Zed as you can see by this blue line but if it isn't press Zed and pull it down we don't have to go down very far let's go now as you can see mine is red now and that's because I have face orientation set on over here and this just means that my model is inside out so I'm going to select everything with a go mesh normals Flip or you could do all n and flip if you wanted to now this is all the right way around and we have some thickness if we go into object mode then we have our model but whoa it's all a bit funny around here and over here we can fix that go into the modifiers tab in displacement change the direction to zed magic now you'd think we were almost there and we are but there seems to be a cat underneath this as well as on top of it we don't really want that so what we're going to do is we're going to make the displacement modifier only app apply to the top of this model rather than underneath it and the way to do that is to use vertex groups so let's do that it's not complicated we go into edit mode we want to select the vertices that should have the displacement on them and that's the top ones so I'm going to do that by pressing the X-ray button and selecting the top ones hope that worked looks like it turn X-ray back off and then go to this little triangle thingy over here and in the vertex groups box press plus and we have a new group now you can rename this if you want to but I can't be bothered so what we're going to do is just assign the selected vertices to this group called group that's pretty much what we need to do if we go back to our displacement now and down here you'll see there's a Vertex group box in there it shows us all the groups it knows about and that's one of them called group if I select that and now go into object mode it's only put the displacement on the top now we're nearly done really except it's still too thick if you look over here it's 11 and a half mm thick if you sha a light underneath there none of the light is going to get through now I'm recommending it should be about 4 mm thick for it to work you might get away with five or even six but I'm going to go for four on this model it's 11 1/2 mm now let's just say 11 and we want 4 mm so we need to take off 7 mm so how are we going to do that well if you press tab going to edit mode and select all the bottom faces and the easiest way to do that considering I already have the top faces selected is to press control I which inverts the selection and then we grab along the Zed AIS by pressing G and Zed and if you look at the top right hand corner it shows how many millimet we've moved we want seven I'll do it's close enough and now let's go into object mode it's very thin maybe a little bit too thin It's Beginning come through so I'm going to drop that down just a little bit more edit mode grab Zed let's go half a millim so 1.5 I'll just that's better now there's one more thing we should probably do with this if we zoom in you can see we have quite sharp points here and your printer nozzle isn't going to be able to print those so it's not absolutely necessary but I would recommend adding another subdivision surface modifier right at the end this might take a little while but when it's done it should smooth all these out and there you go now that's a little bit more smooth and probably will print better not definitely more probably so there you have it we have our lithophane you can print that and if you want to just print this then you can skip forward to the section on the video on how to print this otherwise we'll sit here and we'll make a funny shape out of this now because we have quite a lot of subdivision surface going on here any operations we do are going to be really slow so while we do this I suggest turning off the subdivision surface modifiers let's add a curve a circle there you go there's a circle in there honest if I turn the grid off there's a very small circle in there and then select the grid again and we add a new modifier under form called Curve there it is there whoops there it is there and then if we select this pet thing over here here and select the circle that we created it' be easier to do it up here than in the viewport because you can't even see it now it has made a bit of a mess of everything but if we select the circle scale it eventually after bit of a psychedelic display we'll get something slightly less mad what we have now is we do have our grid which is here and is following the circle just following it on the wrong axis and if we go back to our curve modifier select the grid go to the curve modifier and change the deform access to Y there you go just lifted it up and it's following the circle round we can scale the circle again if we want to scale to make it more bendy maybe even a full cylinder but I'll leave it like this for now and now let's select the grid if we turn our subdivisions on again wh there we go we have our cat on a curve now if you look closely you'll see that it it's not very smooth there's Ridge lines in there and that's because the circle doesn't have enough geometry so I'm just going to add a little bit of geometry to the circle we'll select it go to edit mode right click subdivide and then in this little box down here change this up to 10 we have lots of geometry now and now those ridges have gone and it all looks nice and smooth you can if you want to rotate to this model along the remarkably Z AIS and you can do it this way if you want instead so that's it we have a lithophane following a curve in this case which we can now print so let's go on to printing this first thing we need to do of course is to export this thing so select the model file export STL find a place you want to save it can't remember where I saved it and we'll call it lithophane now remember the selection only box must be TI that's export STL it'll take a moment to do it and we're done so let's look at the printing process I'm going to use prer slicer for this but you can use Cura or any other slicer that you want the technique will still be the same the first thing we're going to do is import our model now it's got quite a lot of triangles but there it is it's already orientated in such a way that there are no overhangs and that would print quite easily but do note it is a tall model and would very easily fall over so if you have print a bed that moves backwards and forwards like this one does it's best to rotate the model so that the bed movement will be as small as possible otherwise it could quite easily knock it over going to rotate this so that most of the movement will be done by the print head moving on the x-axis I think that should do it okay that's fine now we don't want any infill can't have infill on a print like this so I would turn that off now what we need to do instead of infill is increase the number of perimeters in print settings I will set the perimeters this is 4 mm I'm guessing five perimeters should do it but we can check afterwards and they we're almost done but there's still a good chance of this would fall over so I would recommend a brim and I'm going to do a 4 mm brim here so let's slice this and see what we get and this should be okay now there is a little bit of a gap as long as it hasn't got infill in it it'll probably be although if I'm honest I would be happier changing the number of perimeters here so let's just do that print setting layers and perimeters change that to six and reslice that looks better we don't have any infill and we have no gaps there you go that should print okay now if you if you'd like to see any videos on something that YouTube thinks is interesting then please click on one of the videos that appears on the top right and I might put something down the bottom left which is exciting too please feel free to comment if you wish I do read all of them and I answer actually I answer all them too so if you have any questions please put them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you thank you for watching I hope this was useful and thank [Music] you

Channel: Not Very Good Guy

Views: 1,470

Keywords: Blender, 3dprinting, 3dprint, lithophane

Id: wMy50wf8KCI

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024