This tool takes an image and generates a 3D-model of it. When printed using a light colored filament, and applying backlight, you get a stunning effect! The strange looking 3D-model now suddenly appears as a grey scale image :)
I came upon a blog post several years ago where someone had made a lamp using lithophane images on four sides of a cube. They had used a tool at thingiverse.com which converted images to lithophane 3D-models. I took this inspiration and created a lithophane lamp for my then three year old daughter.
Fast forward a few years later and it struck me that Claude (and other LLMs) should know the underlying math and techniques to create such lithophane images. And it sure did! After 15 iterations the tool can even show the 3D-model in a popup!
There are several simple to use tweaks one can do to lower the number of triangles in the output STL. Or else the printer slicer will crash midway during computations. Keep it below 50000 triangles is my rule of thumb.
Final print
As you can see it is difficult to guess what the image looked like before processing!
Backlit magic!
But after... It is kind of magicical :) I now have a tool which fits my needs perfectly. Perhaps someone else want to give it a try.
A link will come soon...
(A quick google search led me to this site doing the same: https://itslitho.com/)