Lithophane 3D Printing

3D Printed Lithophanes

A lithophane is traditionally a porcelain or plastic 3D etching of an image. Lithophanes use variable thickness to recreate an image when a light is used to illuminate the back of the lithophane. The thicker sections let less light through and the thinner sections allow more light to shine through. This results in a image that looks similar to a black and white photo.

As a Secret Santa gift for a friend, I wanted to create 3D printed lithophanes of various images out of PLA plastic. This project proved to be an interesting challenge due to having to perfectly dial in the settings of my 3D printer to achieve a lithophane that produced a clean image. To create a lithophane model, I used Cura to convert my image into a 3D model. I then took this model into my 3D printer's slicing software to dial in the print settings and send it to my printer to start printing. It took many different iterations to dial in my settings and the results can be seen below.

Example Lithophanes

Cal Poly Campus

Original Photo Taken by Joe Johnston

Cal Poly Campus

Lithophane With No Light

Cal Poly Campus

Lithophane With Light

Picture with My Friends

Original Photo

Picture with My Friends

Lithophane With No Light

Picture with My Friends

Lithophane With Light

Bonderson Project Center

Original Photo Taken by Joe Johnston

Bonderson Project Center

Lithophane With No Light

Bonderson Project Center

Lithophane With Light

Mythbusters

Original Poster

Mythbusters

Lithophane With No Light

Mythbusters

Lithophane With Light

Lithophane Box

Additionally for my Secret Santa gift, I designed and fabricated a simple wooden box that contained a light to shine on the lithophanes. I used regular woodshop tools (table saw, miter saw, etc) to cut the pieces of wood for the box. I then created two simple slots to that allow lithophanes to be slide into and out of the box to allow my friend to swap out different lithophanes. Once cut, I simply glued the box together and applied a polyurethane finish to the box.

Lithophane Box Without Inserted Lithophane

Lithophane Box With Inserted Lithophane

Lithophane Settings Spreadsheet

Listed below is my google spreadsheet that contains the different lithophane iterations that I tried. It tracks the settings I used when converting my image to the lithophane model using Cura. Additionally, it includes relevant print settings and any additional notes to help me keep track of the quality of each lithophane. This was a very useful tool to help me control the different settings that I tried and showed me what worked and did not work. This tool allowed me to easily create a finalized print setting that works with most images.