A Closer To The Heart Use For Our Lighting Controllers
What started out as a desire to upgrade the woefully lacking lighting in our passenger cars grew into downtown building lighting control and now lithophane backlighting. Lithophanes have been around for awhile now, but we've never been brave enough to tackle something like this before. Skinning the Grand Hotel is close, but on a larger scale. With lithophanes, a number of parts have to come together precisely, more precisely than anything we've done before.
I say we, but really it was me that decided Ann deserved a Christmas present more from the heart. And what's closer to the heart than a handmade gift featuring our pups? Starting with a view of Brigel standing in the pond beneath the bridge, it progressed into two different prints. One of Brigel laying his head on the arm of the couch at Christmas time, the other of Jasper sitting handsomely in front of the golden rain tree in the Barkyard.
It would have been easier had I read the instructions on the website I used to create the STL files for the lithophanes themselves... You guessed it. I didn't. The site also provides STL files for the picture frame and diffuser plate. Unfortunately all of it is based on starting with a 4x6 photograph. I fed it two different sized pictures, neither of which was 4x6, and neither of which fit their frame that I printed.
You may have noticed these are color and not black & white. There are 3D printers made specifically to print full color renditions, Bambu Labs for example (not sponsored), but we don't have anything that fancy (or expensive). We made due with an actual printed copy of the photograph used to create the lithophane STL and placed it behind the lithophane to add color.
The site actually creates a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) file to send to the printers designed to print in color. The only difference is those printers use white rather than black, then rely on the features of the lithophane to darken accordingly. The site also provides a color picture representation, but I found the color rendition lacking compared to the original photograph.