Nativity Lithophane

My wife collects nativity scenes. I wanted to make her something special and different for Christmas this year. So I was thinking a lithophane. I searched the internet for some images and the traditional ones just didn’t seems to do it. Then I found this amazing picture that I believe is from the movie “The Nativity Story. 2006: The Virgin Mary, Joseph and the birth of Jesus Christ”. What I liked about it was it showed real people portraying the holy family. Mary and Jesus in a bask of light, but it also showed Joseph, leaning in, caring and in awe of the miracle.

I used http://www.3dp.rocks/lithophane/ to convert the picture to a lithophane. Settings I used; Maximum Size 100 mm. Thickness 3mm, border 2mm. Positive image. Oh, and set your infill to 100%! Very important. The rest I used the default settings.

I wanted to have a container to show off this image and to see if not only I could design a unique box, but to see if my printer would be able to print it. It has a curved surface on the back to help reflect the light that creates an extreme overhang.

While not perfect in printing, I think it came out great. And I found that my printer can do 100mm unsupported bridges. To light up the box, I used a part of a 12 Volt string of RGB LEDs that I had around. Cutting off just three to light the box. I salvaged the power adapter and plug from an old Netgear router. Wanting to be able to adjust the brightness I added a ‘buck-boost’ type circuit between the 12 volts in and the RGB LEDs. (paralleled the RGB inputs). Adjusting to 9.5 Volts seems to give great light and the lower voltage hopefully will keep it from getting too hot.

In the end I goofed. (seems to happen a lot). I wanted my wife to be able to use this all year long, so I also made a lithophane family portrait. But the family picture was a slightly different size than the nativity scene. What to do? Remake the family portrait. No, as they take about 4 hours to print. Instead I created another top piece to fill in the gap. Problem solved.

This is not a print for the ‘faint’ of heart. The slicer said it would take almost 9 hours to print the box. 12 ½ hours later it finally finished and an additional 4 hours to print the picture. This is now the longest time of a print that I have made.