Lithophane Creator

What is a lithophane?

You can read more here about the history of Lithophanes.

But this code is designed to let you use a 3D printer to create your own lithophanes from images. How does this work? Well, this code simply takes any image, calculates the grayscale value for each pixel, and then creates a 3D model that represents the extrusion of those grayscale values. Not making sense? Basically, it takes a flat image like this:

And turns it into this:

How do I use this tool?

Once you've downloaded the source code, you'll need to make sure that all the dependencies are installed and setup. First, you need to make sure libraries are installed.

$ npm install get-pixels
$ npm install commander

Next, once you download the source code, you'll also need to make the lithophane.js file executable

$ chmod u+x lithophane.js

Then you'll be able to call the function from the command line.

$ ./lithophane.js -i reference.png

Support

This is a very early release of this, and it's definitely a work in progress with no warranties, so please send any feedback or comments to (@wubbahed).