3D artwork for the visually impaired

thingiverse

So /u/flycouch on reddit had the idea of taking artwork and converting it to a 3D printable form so the texture could be felt by those with visual impairment. I think this is a great idea so I've created this *.stl of the mona lisa, along with an explanation of how to do your own. This can be done with any image, just by following these steps: 1/ Convert your image to greyscale. There are free online services to do this, or you could use photoshop or a free alternative like gimp. 2/ Upload your greyscale image to http://3dp.rocks/lithophane/ to generate a lithophane. This wil convert your greyscale to a lithophane. For some reason it makes the lighter areas thicker, so you would normally need to invert it for a lithophane. That is not neccessary here. In your printing software, scale the depth up by about a factor of 2 to increase the texture. A nice acetone smooth after the print is complete should help avoid any rougher edges, and make it feel nicer to the touch, which is important here. If the resolution of the picture is high, you will end up with an extremely large file that takes a long time to slice. Importing the STL into Blender (a free program) and applying a 'decimate' function, you can reduce the number of polygons, and export it as a smaller STL. Even on my faster PC, this reduced polygon model still takes some time to slice 0.3mm. 0.1mm would take longer still.