sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

A while back I got a 3D printer to play around with and eventually started experimenting with printing lithophanes. From what I've found they are traditionally made from porcelain but folks are now printing them in plastic. I'm still learning what works and have barely scratched the surface (no pun intended).

Here's one that turned out well from a photo of one of my dogs. The first image is just backlit from my laptop screen and the same image lying on a table and looked at on edge.

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

In the spirit of the post by soloboogie this was printed using a cheap Monoprice Select Mini V2 3D printer using white (slightly translucent) PLA material. The printer can be had for ~ $170 when on sale from Amazon.com

The print measures 100mm square and 4mm thick at it's thickest

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

LOL I guess that's a resounding "Nope"

Robg

Are you still doing lithophanes? I recently acquired a 3D printer (Snapmaker A350) and have started experimenting with lithophanes. I'm obviously at the beginning of my learning curve, but have found a couple of websites that make getting started fairly easy: https://lithophanemaker.com/index.html and https://3dp.rocks/lithophane/ .

I've been experimenting with the nightlight and lightbox featured on lithophanemaker, using various PLA colors. I thought semi-transparent might be pretty good, but that was very wrong. So far, plain old white seems to be the best.

I've also been experimenting with slicer settings and lithophane settings, but the number of combinations is probably close to infinite, and would like to know if you've settled on some that work well. One of the things I'd like to improve is print speed. Under my current settings it takes up to 10 hours to print a nightlight and 40 hours to print a full lightbox.

My first "product" is a nightlight for my granddaughter's 3rd birthday. She'll get it in a few days. I wonder how she'll like it.