How to Make a Lithophane Ornament

Lithophanes are images created by having light shine through a gradient of plastic. Thinner areas allow more light through whereas the thicker areas are darker. This is used to create an image. It's pretty sweet, and the technology is developed enough that having a lithophane generated for you is actually pretty easy so it can be utilized for cool personalized projects like these ornaments via 3d printing.

• 3D Printer
• White Filament
• Tea Lights (I used these)
• Superglue
• Ornament Hooks (or paperclips in a pinch)

Step one is to create the image that you want to have printed. The settings I've had good success with starts with an image size of 4320x1600 pixels. You'll notice two important things in the image above. The image is upside down, and the reason for this is that we'll be using a globe lithophane generator. While the base of a globe would face downward, ornaments are hung upside-down so we flip our image to correct for this. Secondly, there is a gap at the top and the bottom of the ornament. As the sphere moves toward the top and bottom, the image distorts. As such, leaving a bit of a gap tends to lead to better results.

While in my example I use 4 images side by side, you are also able to use a 360 image or a panorama for your ornament. These have really nice results, as they will fluidly connect the image without a noticeable stitch.

To generate your lithophane, go to https://lithophanemaker.com/ (and no, I'm not affiliated with the site). Scroll down and select Lithophane Globe Maker. Out of the box, this makes for ideal ornaments.

Upload your image you created in step 1. If you used the same image settings I did you should be gold, but otherwise you may need to do some guess and check. Thankfully, it shows you the image preview so you know what you need to adjust if necessary.

We will be scaling down our ornament, so we need to adjust the thickness settings. The ones I've used and liked are 3.1mm Maximum Thickness and 1.1mm Minimum Thickness.

From here, enter your email address and click Create .stl. It's a relatively fast process.

Bring the generated stl file into your 3d printing software of choice. I use PrusaSlicer, which works well and is free. If you're using the same tea lights as me, set the scale to 49%. If you are using a different set of tea lights, you'll need to determine what sizing you'll need. One way to approach this is to open up Blender (also free) and measure out the opening of the model and compare that to the size of the tea lights. You want the tea lights to be a tight fit, so you'll want to shrink the model down to just barely be larger than the width of tea lights.

Otherwise, be sure to use the finest level of detail possible in print settings.

In terms of the 3d printing itself, be sure to use white filament for best results.

Now it's time to attach the light and hanger to make the ornament functional!

The tea light should come apart into two halves. Take the half that has the actual light and put glue around its perimeter. Then, cram it into the opening of the ornament with just a little bit sticking out at the bottom.

In the meantime, you can glue the hanger onto the other side of the tea light. If you don't have a spare ornament hanger, you can use a paper clip. Just fold the hanger such that half of it is touching as much of the tea light as possible and then apply glue.

As a final "nice to have" touch, you can print out a small white cover that is the same size as the base of your tea light. To do so, you just generate a thin circle with a hole in the middle for the hanger to poke through. This is just to cover up the part where we could otherwise see the hanger glued to the tea light to help pretty things up a bit.

That's it! You've already made it to the finished product! Especially after making your first one, this quickly becomes an easy way to make very cool and thoughtful gifts for friends and family, or to add another fun ornament to your own tree.