Turn any photo, logo, or heightmap into a real 3D mesh — watertight STL for printing, GLB for the web, OBJ for legacy pipelines. The mesher runs on your device, so nothing is ever uploaded.
A photo, a logo, or a greyscale elevation raster. PNG, JPG or WEBP — decoded in the browser.
Plaque for a flat base, Disc for tokens, Terrain for an open surface. Relief and floor set the print's depth.
Noise floor drops the dark background, contrast sharpens edges, smoothing kills sensor grain. Nothing is destructive.
Watertight STL for the slicer, GLB with the source image baked as a texture, OBJ for older CAD, PNG for a reference shot.
Print ready at 80 × 80 × 11.5 mm.
Closed watertight solid inside typical FDM limits — thinnest wall 2.5 mm, total height 11.5 mm. Ready to slice.
Decoded locally — never uploaded
starburst_medal.png
Greyscale heightmaps work too: bright pixels rise, dark pixels sink. Turn on Invert relief in Geometry to flip that — which is exactly what a rubber stamp needs.
Shape of the solid and its base
Peak-to-valley distance above the base. Below 1.5 mm fine detail stops resolving on a 0.4 mm nozzle.
Solid base slab — below 1 mm an FDM wall becomes a single perimeter and splits.
Vertices per side. Detail scales with the square, so 384² carries nine times the resolution of 128² — worth it for facial detail in a lithophane, overkill for a flat logo that 128² exports instantly.
Invert Relief
Swap peaks and valleys — raised designs for stamps
Non-destructive image conditioning
Clips dark background pixels down to the base. Raise to 5–6% on a logo so the flat white paper does not print as a bumpy field.
Above 1.0 steepens midtones and crisps up edges; below 1.0 flattens them. 1.3–1.45 is the sweet spot for flat logos and QR codes.
Suppresses camera sensor grain and pixel stair-stepping. Keep at 0 for sharp vector logos and QR modules.
Thins the outer border of the relief so a sharp corner cannot curl off the plate. Use 5–8% for plaques and signage.
Preview only — nothing here changes the mesh
Turn on Backlight in the viewport rail to preview a lithophane: it swaps the surface for a thickness map, so the bright areas you see are the thin ones your lamp will shine through.
One click writes every value above
Profiles overwrite the current settings — there is no undo stack.
Six jobs this converter was built for — the settings that work, how to orient the print, and the one mistake that ruins each of them. Every card loads its numbers straight into the workbench above.
A backlit panel where thickness becomes brightness — hold it against a lamp and the photo reappears.
On the printer: stand it upright along the bed's Y axis, 0.12 mm layers, 100% infill, white PLA — an 80 × 80 mm panel runs about two hours.
Infill below 100% shows its honeycomb through the picture the moment you backlight it.
A logo lifted 5 mm off a 4 mm slab so it casts a real shadow — reads like machined metal in matte filament.
On the printer: flat on a textured PEI sheet, 0.16 mm layers, 3 walls, 15% infill — the 4 mm floor is what keeps the corners down.
A sharp logo corner curls off the plate without 5–8% edge taper. Outdoors, use PETG or ASA: PLA sags in direct sun.
Greyscale elevation data becomes a 20 mm relief — the model planners, teachers and hikers can actually hold.
On the printer: 0.16 mm layers, 10% infill, grey PLA — switch Solid type to Terrain for the raw surface with no base slab.
Terrain exports an open shell and slicers flag the non-manifold edges. Keep Plaque for anything you plan to sell.
One 128² mesh you print eight-up — conference swag, café coasters or board-game tiles with a coin-style relief.
On the printer: 0.2 mm layers, 20% infill, PETG for pocket life — 8 per plate, and drill the 3.5 mm ring hole for a keytag.
The Disc mask shapes the relief, not the outline: the exported slab is square, so round the corners in your slicer or leave it as a squared coaster.
Invert Relief turns a dark logo into a raised one, so the design presses into dough or greenware instead of sinking in.
On the printer: 0.2 mm layers, 4 walls, 25% infill — and mirror the model in your slicer first, because a stamp prints backwards.
This tool exports the image the way it reads. For food contact, use food-safe filament and seal the print, or keep it to clay and soap.
A scannable code raised 2 mm off the plate — signage that survives a café table better than a laminated sticker.
On the printer: black filament mounted on white, or white filament lit from one side so the raised modules cast their own shadows.
Keep every module at least 0.8 mm wide — at 80 mm across that caps you at a version-20 code, so stay around version 10 and test-scan before mounting.
The workbench above is a thin shell over four numerical stages: luminance sampling, heightfield construction, surface meshing and print validation. This guide opens each stage up — a live optics simulator, a pipeline debugger, and the failure modes that actually bite on a real printer.
See how light rays pass through physical polymer walls in real time. Vary wall thickness, light source intensity, and material attenuation to dial in high-contrast lithophanes before sending G-code to your 3D printer.
Print at 0.08 mm layer height with 100% rectilinear infill, bed temp 60°C, and print speed capped at 45 mm/s to eliminate layer ringing.
Axonix does not perform a naive raster elevation. It executes a 5-stage topological pipeline inside your browser to produce watertight 2-manifold STL and GLB assets.
Luminance calculation matching human eye spectral sensitivity
Human vision has peak sensitivity in the green spectrum (555 nm) and lowest in blue. Standard average (R+G+B)/3 severely skews contrast on warm faces and skies. The ITU-R BT.709 transfer function guarantees faithful tonal graduation before vertex displacement.
Linear RGB averaging distorts face contours: red lips and blue eyes convert with inverted depth values.
Always preserve alpha channels so transparent logo backgrounds fall back cleanly to base floor.
3D relief printing failure diagnosis. Look up visual print symptoms to immediately identify the root cause in slicer parameters or mesh topology.
“A visible honeycomb or grid pattern shines through the photo when backlit.”
Root cause: Slicer infill was set below 100% (e.g., 20% Gyroid or Grid). Internal hollow voids cast dark air-pocket shadows.
Set Infill to 100% Rectilinear. Every layer must be 100% solid plastic with zero internal air pockets.
“Facial curves and gradients look like jagged topological steps instead of smooth photography.”
Root cause: Model was printed flat on the print bed. The 0.4 mm nozzle diameter dictated the resolution of the image.
Rotate the model 90° so it stands vertically along the bed's Y-axis. Set layer height to 0.08–0.12 mm.
“Dark areas of the photo block 100% of the light like solid black plastic, or bright skies look dim.”
Root cause: Wall thickness dynamic range (Peak − Floor) exceeds the filament's optical transmission window.
Use the Beer-Lambert Simulator below. Cap Relief Height between 2.4 mm and 3.2 mm, and keep Floor at 0.8 mm.
“The tall, thin vertical print rocks or detaches from the bed mid-way through a 6-hour print.”
Root cause: A thin vertical lithophane has high leverage and tiny bed contact area (< 4 mm wide).
Add an 8–10 mm outer brim with 0.0 mm brim gap. Clean the PEI sheet with 99% isopropyl alcohol.
“Thin plastic cobwebs across the stepped back face of the lithophane.”
Root cause: Excess nozzle temperature or insufficient retraction during rapid travel moves across relief crevasses.
Lower nozzle temperature by 5°C, set retraction distance to 0.8 mm (direct drive), and enable 'Avoid Crossing Walls'.
Copy production-ready scripts for custom Three.js displacement, Blender modifier stacks, Bambu/OrcaSlicer configs, or automated Python Trimesh solids.
// 1. WebGL & Three.js Displaced Mesh with Perceptual Luminance
import * as THREE from 'three';
export function createLithophaneMesh(imageCanvas: HTMLCanvasElement, reliefMm = 3.0, floorMm = 0.8, segments = 256) {
const ctx = imageCanvas.getContext('2d');
const { width: w, height: h } = imageCanvas;
const pixels = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, w, h).data;
// Subdivided plane matching aspect ratio
const aspect = w / h;
const geo = new THREE.PlaneGeometry(100 * aspect, 100, segments, segments);
const pos = geo.attributes.position;
for (let row = 0; row <= segments; row++) {
for (let col = 0; col <= segments; col++) {
const idx = row * (segments + 1) + col;
const px = Math.min(w - 1, Math.floor((col / segments) * w));
const py = Math.min(h - 1, Math.floor((row / segments) * h));
const offset = (py * w + px) * 4;
// ITU-R BT.709 perceptual luminance
const lum = (0.2126 * pixels[offset] + 0.7152 * pixels[offset + 1] + 0.0722 * pixels[offset + 2]) / 255.0;
// Inverted thickness for lithophane: white = thin (floor), dark = thick (floor + relief)
const thickness = floorMm + (1.0 - Math.pow(lum, 1.2)) * reliefMm;
pos.setZ(idx, thickness);
}
}
geo.computeVertexNormals();
return new THREE.Mesh(geo, new THREE.MeshStandardMaterial({
color: 0xf8fafc,
roughness: 0.45,
metalness: 0.05
}));
}Technical reference for 3D printing enthusiasts, optical engineers, and digital fabricators.
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