Use Blender to Convert Images to 3D printable models!

so i was browsing the internet earlier and i saw somebody asking this question on one of the blender forums how can you turn this image into something like this a 3d representation that can be printed on a 3d printer if you don't have any sculpting skills so the way i would recommend to do it in that scenario is if you go into blender go into the preferences and just type in images make sure you check images as planes and this will allow you to if you press the shift a button to bring in an image from the image menu images as planes choose your image you want to work with that you want to convert and if you just turn on the overlays to texture mode you can see it's brought that image in on a plane what we'll do now is we're going to displace it using that image so we're going to the modifiers and we're going to add a subdivision surface and give this 10 and we'll just change it to simple mode although that did look quite good but anyway simple mode and you can see now if we turn off optimal display we've got a huge amount well not a huge amount but we've got a nice amount of detail so i'm going to apply this control a come back into solid mode we'll turn off the texture we don't need to see that we'll add a displacement modifier and we'll click new and choose to use uv coordinates so it uses the same coordinates as the image click on this little icon to show the texture tab and make sure it's set to type as image or movie and we've got the image in the scene now because the images planes texture add-on brought that in so if you click on this drop down we can choose test image so that's way too much we go back to the modifier and turn this to .006 or something like that the more subdivisions the more detail you're going to get but this is fine for the demonstration purposes i'm going to apply this and i'm going to go in sculpt mode so tab and then sculpt mode what i want to do is make sure that i can't move any of the details around on the x and y axis so i need to lock those by going to the tool section under the symmetry just click on x and y to lock those and now using the blob tool we can actually bring up the areas that should be raised because if we use a displacement from a texture it's going to use the dark and light areas the light areas will be raised and dark areas will be low but obviously for things like this cross that was dark so that's been pushed backwards which we don't want so all we're going to do now is go around the model with the blob tool on right click turn magnify off to make sure the vertices don't get scrunched up we'll turn the strength down to make it easier to work with what we can do now is we can start drawing the bits that need to be raised up and if there are bits that need to be lowered we can hold ctrl and do the same thing i'll bring up the cheeks bring up that nose area probably bring it in around here and just work through it doing this until you're happy with the result i'm not going to do a great job i just want to demonstrate the the principle of the technique so i'll do a very basic job and when you get to areas like this just keep in mind the perspective because things like the little finger here would be closer to the viewer than the finger at the back so you might like to just make this raise a little bit more than those back fingers you can change the size of the brush with the f and you can change the fall off with shift f and when you get to areas like this that are straight you've got two options you can either turn on stabilize stroke which will give you a line that the higher you set the radius the easier it would be to draw straight lines if that's still a bit too tricky you can change it to line then you can just draw the line and then when you let go it will draw etc so i'm not going to do a great job i just wanted to show you the principle of this method and once you've finished you need to get it ready for printing so you could use a solidifier modifier but the problem is it's going to it's going to mess up the the look of it on the back so if you want it to be sort of you know look nice on the back as well as the front rather than using the solidifier modifier which is going to do this sort of thing and it will get worse the more you the thicker you make it we'll get rid of that and we're going to edit mode what we can do we can press number two to select edge mode and then we'll choose select select loops and then boundary loop that will select the outer edge and we can e z to extrude downwards a bit and at this point we can either fill it so we can press the f key and that will solidify it but if we want this same pattern on the back what we could do instead so press ctrl 3 so it's going to select those faces which are connected to the bounding edge we'll press ctrl i to select the top faces the original faces we'll do shift d to duplicate them and then we're going to move them down on by pressing g and then z and bring that down until it's aligned approximately there and then we can select everything and then do select loops boundary loops and that will select both those boundary loops and now we can right click and we can try and do a bridge where is it do ctrl e and then bridge edge loops there we are and you can see it's bridge those edge loops now so it's a solid object and you might just want to check that the normals are correct because these bottom normals are probably going to be wrong i'm not sure if that makes a difference to 3d printing but if it does you can do that you can fix that by turning on face orientation and then just press number three select everything and then just do a shift n that will ensure everything's facing outward and then you've got a nice look on the back the same as on the front and that's one way you could do it until you picked up adequate sculpting skills to you know do a really nice job but for a starter that's not a bad result i mean that is a bad result but if you're more careful than i was then you should get a nice result so thanks for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: 3d illusions

Views: 68,647

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, 3d, 3d printing, 3d printing blender, blender for 3d printing, convert image to 3d, 2d image to 3d in blender, blender sculpting, sculpting tutorial blender, blender sculpting tutorial beginner

Id: f25h308PVlg

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021