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Showing posts from August, 2020

Engineering my cat into keychain charm.

 Cats. What can I say that hasn't already been said. But this is about a process to turn a picture of my cat into a lithophane. The difficulty: the shape should match the outline of the cat. To go about this I needed 4 tools: image editing software, an image to lithophane converter, Inkscape, and a STL editor. The first step was to isolate my cat in the picture: This was probably the most time consuming aspect, carefully tracing her outline and removing the background. For this I used paint.net but you can use whatever you are familiar with. The result: After isolating her I also made a 2nd image, which will be used later for creating the outline. This image is simply the area where the background was but filled black, the inverse of above. You can see I smoothed the edges a bit too: The next step is to use a lithophane generator to create the STL. My favorite is:  http://3dp.rocks/lithophane/  . You will want to use a flat model, turn off the border, and set base/stand d...