The definition of Narcissism, A guide to 3D printing pictures

This is a guide to anyone who'd want to print a 3D picture of themselves, and it's also my conclusion on this personal assignment.

So in case you have never met me, or haven't seen the last few posts on this blog, this type of 3D picture is called a Lithophane , which is basically an image you can see to it's fullest when there's a light behind it.

There are several rules to make this picture work, so let's go through the steps:

1.    Take a picture.

The background doesn't matter, the light should be good enough to at least see the subject (yes you can take a picture of the sun for all I care) and no, you don't need a 300 € Canon camera for this.

2.    Import it into Photoshop or Photopea and make it gray

If we're in Photoshop here's how we do: go into the Adjustments tab.

Then into the Channel adjustment. From there, where it reads Default I switched to Black & White with Orange filter. You can try the others for yourself and see if any of them fit better for your picture, I just picked this because it gave a much smoother contrast between the hair, face and eyes.

If we're in Photopea: 

Go into the Channels tab right above your Layers and select the Red channel for the same effect.

3.    Make it fancy, add a background!

Whatever picture you're gonna use for the background, put it on another layer and adjust it's channel to fit the subject.

4.    Decide the shape

Square? Circle? Star? Well I went with circle on this. Don't stress over this too much.

5.    Go to lithophanemaker.com

Here you can choose a variety of shapes to convert the picture in (note: just click one of the pictures on the front page).

While adjusting the numbers, the schematics to the right always change. Pay attention.

The picture detection settings are important if you want to adjust the detection scale. This basically changes how much of the picture you want to use. Adjust the scale with the three settings seen bellow.

Before exporting, you will need to add your email address at the bottom of the settings column. Don't worry, you won't get any Spam or ads. You can also create an account to not have to do this every time and save your settings for your next project.

6.    Open a slicer

A slicer is a software that converts 3D files into a language a 3D printer can understand. This is where we make our final adjustments.

I used the Cura slicer for this.

Once you import the model, it might look too thick sometimes, but don't panic. You can just scale the Z axis (blue) and lower it until it looks nice. 

NOTE: turn off the Uniform Scaling for this.

You can also adjust how big the entire model should be, but turn on the Uniform Scaling back on to not mess up the picture.

Finally, these are the settings I used for this piece. You don't need any supports for this or build plate adhesion. You might just want to adjust your Speed in the long run, but you can also do that on the actual printer if it's going too fast for the details.

Also use a 0.4 mm nozzle.

Ta~daaa