Research On Lithophane Generation Based On 3D Printing

With enriching material life,improving living standards and colorful spiritual life in recent years,more people begin to show their interest in music,painting,sculpture and other arts,thus expediting vigorous development of art industry.As an emerging form of sculpture,lithophanes are increasingly favored by people with their novel shapes,archaic images and strong sense of layers.However,due to less efficient traditional ways of producing or processing lithophanes and uneven quality,lithophanes have been greatly hindered in their development.In this context,therefore,a convenient and efficient method is necessary to make excellent lithophane products.An emerging method is put forward in this dissertation to produce lithophane models based on 3D printing technology after an in-depth investigation of the principles of lithophane imaging in the traditional ways of making or processing lithophanes.It includes the three major aspects to make lithophanes,i.e.generation of lithophane digital models,implementation of a color printer and partition printing.Firstly,as lithophanes are sensitive to brightness of images,a compression method of gray-scale images is adopted to enhance the brightness of images,and an OpenGL software is used to convert 2D images to 3D images.Experiment has confirmed that the process of generating high-quality digital models is very simple.Secondly,designed a color 3D printer by upgrading the control circuit and the printing head based on open-source printers.Bresenham's line algorithm is introduced in the stepper motor control system of color 3D printers,achieving the effect of controlling triaxial and three-way extruders simultaneously.In addition,Gcode command has also been added for multi-axis control.Thirdly,based on traditional ways of generating lithophanes,lithophanes in this dissertation are also characterized by the luminous and protective functions,in order to foster their diversity and practicability.To add the two extra layers of material,partition printing method is designed to mark different regions in Cura Open Source Software.As a result,different kinds of material can be printed in separated regions.In addition,a method of maximum overshoot is thus created to avoid mutual interference in the process of changing materials to the greatest extent.In the end,an automatic way of generating lithophanes is realized in this paper.With this method,users can get a custom-made lithophane with a photo and some simple settings.It provides a feasible way for producing and processing lithophanes by greatly improving the efficiency and satisfying people's demand for custom-made products to the greatest extent.