so i was looking for an easy way to convert2d photos into 3d printed images. stick around to see how i did it. i was doing a little bit of research and ifound out that i could convert a 2d photo, or a picture, into a 3d print, and it wascalled a lithophane. so how the process works is that it takesthe 2d image and where it’s lighter it doesn’t
3d print show new york, print as much but where it’s darker, itprints more, so less light can come through. i researched different methods of using blenderand zbrush but essentially what i was looking for was a really simple, easy way of convertingthe images into lithophanes. so after a little bit more research i founda piece of software called photo to mesh.
so photo to mesh does exactly what the titleimplies. it takes a photo and it converts it into a 3d mesh. now the beauty of this software is it doesmore than just create lithophanes. but for this video i’m going to concentrateon the lithophanes itself. full disclosure: ransen software did supplyme with a licence so i could fully review this piece of software. but in saying that, i wasn’t paid to dothis review. i did make it clear that i would be creatingan unbiased review and that i would be including pros and cons to show how i really felt aboutthe software.
but, in saying that, let’s get on and havea look at how the software works. ok, so here we have the photo to mesh version6 software and for now just ignore the wookiee. so we’ll go to the file menu and open image. what we’ll do is we’ll just choose animage here…who’s that handsome devil? hit open. ok, so here what you can do is change thebrightness settings if you want to take out some of those dark spots. change the contrastas well… for now i’ll leave that at 1.2 and 1.2. those are the settings that i found work wellfor this image.
so i’ll click next. this is where you can rotate the image ifyou need to - i don’t want to so i’ll just leave that as is. hit next, and this is where you can selectpart or all of the image, and for this i’ll just select all of the image, and hit next. ok so let me just step you through some ofthe settings here. one of the first ones is smoothing. you cansee the image down here; it looks a little bit blurry. so what we can do is we can change that to0.05, hit recreate model and you’ll see
that the lithophane has more definition nowto it. so that’s one of the things. now the next thing is the x samples and they samples. at the moment they’re set to 250, and that’s 250 times its sampling thelength of the photo. so, we can change that to 500 and it willbe doubled. so the stl file now is 24 megabytes. it was12, so it’s pretty much doubled that. now if we change the y samples to 500 thathas doubled what the x samples was, so it’s quadrupled it, basically. so that then brings more definition to theimage.
so have a look down here, and when we hitrecreate you can see that it’s defined that image a lot more – so there’s a lot moredetail in there. ok, next step here is you can define how longyou want it to be so at the moment it’s at 100 which is 10 centimetres or 4 inches,and we’ve locked the y dimension so it doesn’t stretch it out of shape. so 100 is fine for me for this moment. the next is the height of the mesh, or thez height. now this one’s set at 2 millimetres. what i like to do is change that to 3.4 andi’ll change the slab thickness to 0.8. so the slab thickness is how thick it willbe when it’s completely white. so 0.8 of
a millimetre – that’s about, if you’reprinting a 0.2 millimetre layer height, you’re looking at about 4 layers. so that’s pretty good i think. and 3.4 millimetres – that’s how highthe darkest point, or where black is on the image, will be. so if we hit recreate model you’ll see thatgets a bit thicker and you can actually see there’s a little bit more detail in therebecause we’ve increased the z height. the other thing is the invert mesh. now atthe moment it’s doing it just like a normal image would but if you want to make it looklike a negative, take off the invert mesh
and now, when you print that out, that willlook like a negative. i like that as a normal image, so i’m justgoing to recreate that. now, that’s pretty much it for the basicsettings for a lithophane – there’s other ones you can go into but for the moment, that’sfine. the only other thing is under image placement,i’ve set the width and the height to 90. that way it gives me a little bit around theedges so i can mount it in some sort of a frame a little bit later. the position, 50% and 50%, that just meansdead centre. so we’ll hit ok and that’s pretty muchit.
so for the lithophane, you can go to filemenu, save stl and save it in there. done! ok, so i’ve pulled in the non-inverted meshin the simplified 3d and you can see there the different height mats that you’ve got. so that’s the negative image. let’s havea look and see, and prepare to print, how long that takes. so we’re looking at about an hour and 32minutes and we’re using about almost 20 grams – a cost of about 79 cents. that’sin aud. that’s not too bad. let’s get out of that though and we’llremove that one.
let’s have a look at the other one… so, you can see therenow, that’s a lot thicker on the edges, and, let’s see how long that takes. so due to the increase around the edges, andthere’ll be infill there as well, which i’ve set at 25%, you’ve got 2 hours and7 minutes, about 9,700, about 29 – 30 grams, so an extra 10 grams and it’s going to cost$1.18 aud. so, not too bad. i could probably bring thelayer height down a little bit, but, i’m quite happy with that because i like to havethe definition there. so when it’s ready just begin to print. let’s have a look at some time-lapse.
so here you can see both lithophanes printingside-by-side. on the left we have the non-inverted lithophanewhich is the one that will give an effect like a photo negative. the right side is the inverted lithophanewhich will appear similar to a photo. the xyz davinci 1.0 3d printer is extrudingabs filament at 220Ⱐc onto a heated bed of about 90Ⱐc. the lithophanes were sliced using simplified3d which currently sells online for about $149 usd. after using xyz software and slic3r, the onewith the 3 instead of the ‘e’, i find
that simplified 3d slices faster and a lotbetter than the other two. and i feel that the money i invested into it was well worthit. in just a moment you’ll see the lithophaneon the left hand side stop printing. but what happened next was the gcode for sendingthe hot end back to its home, failed to send. so when i show that off, you’ll get to seethat in the finished product. so the right hand side printer is just aboutto finish up so stick around to see how they both turned out. so, after all that awesome time-lapse footage,here we have the lithophanes! the non-inverted lithophane has the appearanceof an old film negative when held up to the
light. for me personally, this is not the effectthat i was looking for. now you can see the inverted image and itlooks great. you can see the dark areas of the shirt and the light areas of the face;everything is in really nice contrast. and just for comparison’s sake, here’san early test i did with an image that had the background removed. so firstly, let’s get the cons out of theway – and i must say, i was hard-pressed to find many. the only major con that i could find is thatit wasn’t simple in the gui to find the
measurements. now, after a little bit of hunting aroundon the online help i did find that the units of measurements were in millimetres. however, if it was included in the software’sgui i think it would make it a little bit easier for new users to find their way aroundthe software. once again, this is probably just more a constructivecriticism, than a con. so, on to the pros. now, after watching quite a few videos ofthe construction method of lithophanes from a 2d image to a 3d image, i found that thispiece of software, photo to mesh, does it
a lot quicker than any of the other methodsout there. so if you don’t already own the big softwareslike zbrush or maxcon, you can get the same effect from just using this small piece ofsoftware. second would be the cost. now zbrush is a piece of software that professionalsuse to model 3d models. it can be used to make lithophanes, however,it does cost quite a bit of money. so, if you’re not looking to spend, or learna new piece of software, then for under $100 you can get photo to mesh. there’s no big learning curve and it justdoes what it does. no mucking around.
overall, if you’re looking to get into lithophanesor converting 2d images into 3d meshes, then i think photo mesh is the perfect fit. in future videos i will be exploring otherfeatures of photo to mesh so make sure you subscribe to my channel. if you saw anything here that i didn’t coveror if you’ve got a question for me, leave me a comment down below, or, send me a questionon twitter. i’m @techwiztime i hope you enjoyed this video! if you didgive me a big thumbs-up and maybe even leave a comment down below.
if you do enjoy the content that i’m providinghere, make sure you subscribe to my channel,
as it really helps me a lot. as always, imagine learn create bye!
