What is GistNoesis Stl to relief ?

Stl to relief is a free tool to transform 3d objects into relief.

It takes meshes in STL format, which you can often find for free on various sites, and help you make bas-relief of desired dimensions.

A bas relief is like an image but with a nice 3d effect. It makes objects that can be molded and casted easily.

With the development of 3d-printing and desktop CNC there are no longer excuses not to live surrounded by art everywhere.

Bas-relief refine the essence of a 3d object into a small volume allowing for fast printing or milling time and low space occupancy

This means that sculptures created with this tool make great wall decorations.

You can make custom pictograms to tell emotional stories, it is a multi-millenial medium revisited by modern age, or fridge magnets...

It is a great tool for 3d-printer and CNC mills

If you don't have a 3d-printer or CNC you can use 3d printing services like Shapeways

Let's talk money !

This is proprietary software, let me explain why :

It is free to use for non-commercial usage but you must "attribute" us to help the discovery of this tool, and donations are appreciated

It is free to use for commercial usage but you must "attribute" us to help the discovery of this tool, and based on honor system a 10% mark-up donation for us is expected to help fund the development ecosystem

By "attribute" I mean provide your users with
Made using : https://gistnoesis.github.io/StlToRelief

The code is on github, and can be run locally, feel free to star us or report issues there.

You are not allowed to serve this code, nor distribute it

It is to prevent a similar service which would save everything to the cloud, own your creations, add watermarks and API calls to 3d printing services, take a commission and outgrow us with marketing spend, therefore preventing our sustainable development

If you use free 3d files as input don't forget to check their respective licenses.

Attributions :

Special thanks for the 3d models used on this page avaiable with a Creative-Commons Attribute free for commercial-use license :
Fennec : https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:20748
Gear : https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-planetary-gear-assembly-2525
Dragon : https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-red-dragon-60976
Alien : https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1366450
Table : https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1385161
Heart : https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:246864

How to use this tool ?

From top to bottom:

Display configuration :

set the screen pixel size so you can measure on your screen with a digital calipher the distances if needed.

Scene :

You can clear the scene, import and export the scene.

Stock :

Describe the shape of the output relief. StockZ is the height of the relief, the thickness of the bottom plate is not included. Total Thickness = StockZ + bottomThickness

Add Objects :

You can either load STL file from disk or use some of the provided meshes to play with.

Move Objects :

Only one object at a time. You can use the mouse , touch interfaces, or fill the boxes.

Mouse commands :

drag object to rotate, ctrl-drag or double-click drag to translate, shift-drag or scroll to scale

Touch commands :

drag object to rotate, double-tap drag to translate, two-finger drag to scale. Be aware of scroll hijacking (worst case if you can't zoom out do a "search on page")

Various centering buttons :

help position the objects so that their borders are centered.

Z moves :

helps bring hidden objects to the front when you can't select them.

Far clipping plane :

Between 0 and 1 set how far is the background plane.

Just Scale :

Fast and simple, don't do the geometric projection but does the job for milling import the file into Fusion360 and mill down to the Z=0 plane

Make Relief :

For 3d-printers, do the geometric projection.

Use a rastering algorithm to avoid the numerical instabilities and quadratic cost of CSG algorithm, and it would also allow us advance features like adding draft angles.

The resolution is in triangle per unit, typically use 1 on mobile, 3 on laptop, 8 to remove artifacts before final export.

You can turn-off AntiAliasing to increase generation speed but with aliasing artifacts

You can choose if you want the background removed or not.

You can use negative background Thickness to generate negative reliefs

If you use color printing printing light surfaces at the top and dark surface at the bottom will help increase depth perception.

If you are not doing color printing you can try non-planar slicing to improve surface quality.

Export :

Export the result to stl. Ready to slice or generate toolpath.

Post-Processing :

The output mesh is a closed surface per construction.

You can also use meshlab to reduce the triangle count Meshlab -> Filters -> Remeshing -> Quadratic Edge Decimation -> (with preserve Topology)

The model has some zero-width triangles that meshlab won't unify properly so don't unify vertices when meshlab propose it.

If the model has some imperfection you can smoothen them out with Meshlab -> Filters -> Smoothing -> Laplacian Smooth (Surface preserve)

If you want just a shell of desired thickness (to reduce material costs while still guaranteeing printability) you can use the checkbox "Top Surface", then either use CAD tools to thicken the surface

or use meshlab -> Filters -> Remeshing -> Uniform Mesh Resampling but be aware that it is very slow.