Lithophane efforts

Saw a lot of people making these. Looked awfully easy.
It was.
Used the Cura method. Basically…just open an image in Cura and go…with a few tweaks.

Images were nice and high res. Had to shrink them quite a bit. Res 500.
Height 4 mm
Base : .4
darker is higher
light smoothing

white Village plastic HIPS
used the default Lulzbot settings for Village Plastics HIPS, except fill was set to 0 and retraction was not enabled.
I saw some folks recommending that to avoid clogs. I’d like to try it again with retraction. It might clean up some stray angel hair in there. But my printing time before Mother’s Day is limited. But, I kind of like the old-timey sepia effect. Still need to finish 2 individual portraits and the frame.

I had originally tried natural PLA on a smaller test run. Too clear. Yellow might have been nice. Again…kind of a sepia effect. However, I’m going to put a Hue color bulb to this after I print out a frame and buy a lamp kit. And figure out what to make for a base.

I did put a ‘tan’ border around the image with the Gimp. I wanted a uniform thickness on the border. White would have been way to thin and I didn’t want a “black” border around it. The frame will handle that.

Only concern I had while watching it print is that I was worried some of the really dark sections would be too much of a bridge. But, this HIPS is really nice and those side fans would kick in and it had no problems ultimately covering up those spans after a couple layers.

Hi
I know nothing about Lithophane projects but, I’m wondering what your end result was.
Did you back light your project as of yet?
How did you generate the STL?

Every now and then, I run into some of this type of stuff.
I’m very curious as to how it worked out for yourself

Sorry it’s been so long since I replied.
The results were great.
Other than adding a ‘light brown’ border around my pictures in The Gimp to get a uniform thickness as I was printing a ‘frame’ for them. I think I might have adjusted the aspect ratio/dimensions on one of them too, but otherwise the images were unaltered.

I used white HIPS. I don’t know which brand, but I bought it direct from Lulzbot. It was cheap. Like $9 for a roll. It might have been clearance.

I just opened the image in Cura.
I documented some of the settings.

Height: 4
Base: .4
“Darker is Higher”
“Light Smoothing”
unclick the box labeled “enable retraction” (I may have forgotten this once, but I can’t remember, most sites said to disable retraction
layer height: .18
shell thickness .5
top fill .4
bottom fill .4
density 20

At least that’s what’s on my scribbles. I think almost all of these were actually already the default off of the “Quick settings” preloaded to the material in Cura.

Retraction might be the only one I changed.

It’s way more forgiving of a print/result than you think. I thought it was going to take several efforts. I got pretty good results right off the bat.


I ended up printing 4 of those panels and then printed a ‘frame’ that held them. The frame didn’t go so great as it had 4 long, narrow ‘towers’. They got pretty wobbly towards the end of the print and lost some definition…but I was able to eke it out. There was a ‘lid’ with some writing on it. Printed a simple base and bought a lamp kit and outfitted the thing with a Hue bulb so I can make it change colors and all. Kinda fun. Learned a lot printing the frame.