How to print a drawing ?  

Er, just use an inkjet or laser printer.  It's completely stupid to print 2D images with a 3D printer.  You can print a 3D frame for it if you must...

Cheerio,

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Do you think your reply is appropriate ?   That did not answer my question.

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Here one of many examples.

RE: How to print a drawing ?

That did not answer my question.

It did.  It's clear from your illustration that you already have your image in a printable form so my answer is appropriate.  A 3D printer is not the answer to every problem: if you wish you could use one to pound screws into wood if you don't have a hammer but I don't advise it.

Cheerio,

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Actually Diem I can think of quite a good reason for printing such an illustration as a 3d print.  Tactility.  For those with vision problems who use touch to 'see' then printing a raised image on a 3d printer actually makes sense.  There are also artistic reasons for such a case too.

Just because to you personally a use is 'completely stupid' does not make it so.  Thank you to Rene for providing a reasonable answer.  

RE:

Although I dislike intensely Cura’s interface, it has some features that Prusa Slicer hasn’t. For instance, you can load directly graphic formats like *.png or *. jpg, converting them to *.3mf or *.stl 3D formats. When you load the graphic file, Cura gives the option of select the height of the 3D file according to the brightness of each pixel ( i.e. black is higher and white is lower or vice versa).

To get a printable file, regular photos won’t work. It needs to be a neat drawing with clear lines. The smaller the detail and tinier the lines, the more difficult is to make the conversion. More often than not, Cura generates a file full or errors. What I do then is to open the buggy stl file in Prusa Slicer and try to repair it using the Netfab service. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Anyway, provided the file is successfully repaired, it’s always difficult to get a faithful 3D reproduction of drawings with tiny lines, even using a 0.25mm nozzle.

Below I include a zipped file of a 3mf project obtained with your example.  As you can see, it’s just passable, nothing to write home about.

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Thank you guys for your help. Now i know where to go 🙂

RE:

I did something like that when I was experimenting with a model for a contest ( https://www.printables.com/model/481465-tissue-box-yawning-charlie-chaplin)
but the size was so big I decided just to print it on normal printer 🙂

Ok, things to note from my journey:
- if you have an image like above then first thing is to process it and remove unwanted elements with photo editing software like dirt, scratches etc
- then you need to convert it to vector (can be done with various tools), in that case looks like 2 colors (black/white) should be sufficient.
- you can also decide if you actually want to print specific color - for example maybe print white only and fill in with black resin, or maybe make it 2 layers: white background square and black as on-top prints
- import vector to 3D program to extrude it from flat to in depth, let say each color in 2mm
- move one layer higher, so for example black color is over all white area (in that case just ignore white color and make it a solid rectangle and extrude it to 2mm), but notice you may really need a background for a color base, so maybe 2 color print may be needed.
- you may need to chop it into smaller parts to assemble bigger object from smaller prints

Also look for 'hueforge' that is printing with filament using software https://shop.thehueforge.com/collections/hueforge, and example models https://www.printables.com/search/all?q=hueforge

The Result

Hi. Thanks for your help.

Ich converted the Picture via Incskape and than filled the spaces by hand in Fusion.

Printed it on my new MK4 with vanilla white and bronze PLA.  Rim separate in galaxy black.

i'm quite happy with the result. (only, it could be bigger 🙂

And yes: i think this looks nicer than a print with an inkjet 😉

RE: How to print a drawing ?

@neophyl

I can think of quite a good reason for printing such an illustration as a 3d print. Tactility. For those with vision problems who use touch to 'see'

Some illustrations, yes, but not this level of complexity; it would need considerable simplification - and that wasn't the original question anyway.  As for 'art'; have you looked at printables lately?  There are thousands of 2D images, whole clip-art collections, being converted to .stl purely to harvest Prusameters.  No-one is ever going to download them and they just pollute the space making search even less use.

No. I stand by my opinion that this is a stupid use for a 3D printer when other, more appropriate, cheaper, more accurate technologies for reproducing a photograph exist.

Cheerio,

RE: How to print a drawing ?

I have to agree with Neophyl. The question is a valid one and not stupid. It's also not the fault of the above user that people pullote Printables with content spam.
The image is certainly a complicated one for printing a shape and I can think of two strategies, depending on what the aim is. The one strategy is explained in the above link but will need considerable manual polishing of the graphic prior to transformation into a vector graphic or afterwards (the lines and numbering are making it too complex in my opinion). 

The other approach would be a a colour based height map. That would be a pixel based method but there the contours would have to be sufficiently wider than the nozzle diameter (leading to a pretty sizeable print, maybe even multipart print). 

Cura Slicer apparently has an inbuilt function of printing height maps from images. ( https://all3dp.com/2/3d-printing-topographic-maps-tutorial/ )
I never tried it but it doesn't sound too complicated. 

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Actually, to be able to take a picture and turn it into a 3D print would be a great way to ‘print’ tshirts- which with the MK4/XL pressure based bed leveling would be perfect.  The XL with its semi floating heatbed might make it even easier to print t shirts…

RE: How to print a drawing ?

Posted by: @milehigh3der

Actually, to be able to take a picture and turn it into a 3D print would be a great way to ‘print’ tshirts- which with the MK4/XL pressure based bed leveling would be perfect.  The XL with its semi floating heatbed might make it even easier to print t shirts…

It's still not the optimum way.  Just get one of the iron-on sheets that you print on using a standard color printer.  Trying to print on a cloth (probably cotton) t-shirt with a 200C+ nozzle sounds like a good way to start a fire to me.

RE: How to print a drawing ?

There’re some videos on youtube about 3D printing on cloth. Leaving apart the non negligible safety question, I wasn’t impressed at all with the results, if compared with the standard system ( dedicated inkjet printer, transfer foils and so on ). Anyway, it might be fun to try a 3D printer. One thing I remember from these videos is that the only filaments worth trying are TPU/TPE. All the others are too rigid to be of practical use. T-shirts would become T-shields. 😋