I love making lithophanes because they are colorful and easy to print. For best viewing, they need a brighter light than one tealight can provide. I designed a display system that can use up to 3 tealights or a USB light stick. The top of the display case lifts off easily to change out the hexaphane slides. The storage rack on the back of the case has room for six additional slides. There is also a top frame with no tealight holes if only using the USB light stick.
Printing Instructions
A multi-material printing system is strongly suggested. There are 16 color changes for each slide. I have provided two .3MF files for Bambu Studio; one with the display case only and the other with all five lithophanes for easy printing on Bambu Labs printers. For other slicers, there are several steps required to generate the hex shape. Each lithophane was created at Lithophanemaker.com using these settings:
Lithophane Resolution: 0.3
Colored Resolution: 0.8
Layer Height: 0.1
Width: 115
Maximum Thickness: 2.3
Minimum Thickness: 0.8
Height: 115.00
First Layer Height: 0.2
Filaments for Color Palette: Palette 1
This generates a 115mm square lithophane. You can generate your own 115m square lithophane using these settings and create the hex shape using the procedure below. Use the “Hex Mask” stl to create a negative volume object on top of the lithophane.
I used the following IIIDMax PLA+ colors, but you can use similar colors from any manufacturer.
IIIDMax Colors | RGB | Hex |
---|---|---|
White | 231,231,224 | #e7e7e0 |
Yellow | 246,196,45 | #f6c42d |
Light Blue | 34,155,213 | #229bd5 |
Fuchsia | 162,70,141 | #a2468d |