Image to STL
Converts an image into a printable solid in two modes: brightness-based relief or threshold extrusion for logos and silhouettes. Exports STL with a base included.
Converts an image into a printable solid in two modes: brightness-based relief or threshold extrusion for logos and silhouettes. Exports STL with a base included.
PNG or JPG. Photos for relief; high-contrast logos for plaque mode.
Heightmap turns brightness into height; threshold separates figure from background and extrudes the figure.
A watertight solid with a base, slicer-ready with no repairs needed.
They are two different ways of turning a picture into volume, and they are seen under opposite conditions. A lithophane is viewed BACKLIT: material thickness blocks light, so the dark areas of the photo are the thick ones and the image only appears once you put a lamp behind it. The relief produced by the ilove3d image-to-STL tool is viewed under DIRECT LIGHT: height casts its own shadows and the image reads face-on, sitting on a desk or hanging on a wall. That difference decides which one you want. For a backlit portrait, a lamp or an illuminated frame, use the lithophane. For a coin, a commemorative plaque, a raised logo or a stamp, use this one. Material matters too: relief works in any filament colour, whereas a lithophane needs white or natural so light can pass through it at all.
Logos, silhouettes and any high-contrast image with a clean background. Threshold mode in the ilove3d image-to-STL generator makes a binary decision at every point: above the luminance threshold it extrudes, below it does not. That works perfectly when the image already separates into two tones — a black logo on white, a cut-out silhouette, scanned lettering — because the edge lands exactly where you expect. With a soft gradient or a photograph carrying shadows, the threshold cuts halfway through a transition and the outline comes out jagged, with loose islands and isolated pixels the slicer then cannot print. For those images there is heightmap mode, which translates every grey level into a different height instead of choosing between two. If you are unsure, try both: the preview shows the difference immediately. A practical trick when a photo almost works: raise the contrast in any image editor first, so the tones separate cleanly before the threshold ever sees them.
Because without it the piece can come out impossible to print. A figure extruded from an image usually has parts that do not touch each other — the bar of a letter A, the dot on an i, the islands inside a logo — and with no plate joining them, the result is not one object but several loose ones floating in space. Worse still, at the threshold edges there are regions where thickness tends to zero, which means zero-width walls no slicer can handle. The base plate in the ilove3d image-to-STL generator solves both at once: it guarantees a single rigid piece, and it gives every detail a floor to stand on. Its thickness is adjustable, so if you want something slimmer you can lower it, but you cannot remove it altogether. If the design genuinely needs pieces that float free of each other, the honest approach is generating them separately and assembling afterwards, rather than fighting the plate.
For a coin or a commemorative plaque, 1 to 3 mm of relief over a 2 to 3 mm base is the range that works best: it prints without supports, the shadows pick out the detail well, and the piece stays rigid. Above roughly 5 mm of relief the side walls become very vertical and start demanding more care with cooling, particularly on fine details that rise on their own. The ilove3d image-to-STL generator shows both thicknesses separately so you can adjust them without guessing. One thing worth knowing: relief height does not improve the resolution of the detail, which is set by the sample count and by your nozzle diameter. Raising the relief makes the shadows deeper, not the image sharper. Bear in mind too that a taller relief takes proportionally longer to print, since every extra millimetre is another set of layers over the whole footprint of the piece.