Hey friends welcome back to Make Anything it's Devin here as always
and lately I've been trying to focus on some larger and therefore more time-consuming projects
but I also miss putting out videos for y'all so today I thought I'd walk you through a smaller
holiday project that you can all customize and expand upon in the form of these fun little
snowflake ornaments I've been working on expanding my skill set beyond just 3D printing lately
and in the past year I've acquired some pretty awesome machines like the MakeBlock Laserbox
this 40 watt CO2 laser and the Snapmaker 2.0 which includes a 1600 milliwatt laser engraver
laser cutters and 3D printers are both super powerful tools for rapid prototyping
and small scale manufacture with some pretty clear trade-offs 3D printers can produce these
super complex forms with ease but they're limited in materials with hobby FDM printers
mostly just printing plastic filaments whereas laser cutters can cut and engrave a much
wider range of materials but they're generally limited to cutting flat sheets of that material
the great news is we don't need to use these tools in isolation so for today's designs we'll
be combining laser cut and 3D printed parts to make our creations a bit more interesting
in fact that's exactly what i did for my first special limited series of Astrolabicon puzzles
so here it is the Series 1 Astrolabicon Atom Edition this limited run of only 10 puzzles
has been printed using some of my favorite top tier filaments and it includes this awesome stand
with the addition number engraved onto a mirror as I said the combination of laser cutting
and 3d printing can produce some extra special pieces and that's exactly what my aim was with
this limited series I'm hoping that the extra finesse I put into these 10 puzzles makes them
a collectible item that can be cherished so if you're interested they'll be available now
through a link in the video description so with that out of the way let's look at how
I made these fun snowflake ornaments so that you can create your very own invaluable collectibles
so the reason I started this project is that my sister is making a baby I wanted to make some
gifts for the baby shower but all I really had was a sonogram I decided to make a snowflake ornament
that could maybe double as a coaster since this is a winter baby and I like multi-purpose things
I figured this grayscale sonogram is the perfect subject for lithophane lithophanes are artworks
that cast a detailed image when lit from behind and it turns out 3D printing is a really effective
way to produce them something as simple as varying material thickness can generate these incredibly
detailed images it's a really impressive effect so let's go ahead and prepare our baby photo
so here's the snowflake I designed in Adobe Illustrator with an opening in the center
for that lithophane I'll bring that into Photoshop to make sure our baby is framed nicely
and while we're at it i want to desaturate this photo so it's purely grayscale and I'll adjust
the levels so it ranges all the way from true black to true white for the best lithophane
I also had to add some details around the photo since it didn't fit perfectly inside this hexagon
once it looks good I'll save it as a jpeg as I mentioned 3D printing lithophanes is fairly
popular by now so there are several web-based generators to help simplify the process
here's the one I like to use so let's import that grayscale photo we just made
we'll go to the image settings and set the image to positive and if we check out the model
settings well they're already tuned for a good 3D printed lithophane so we won't touch those we can
preview the file here and we see that the black areas of the photo are the thickest in the model
so they'll block the most light that's what we want so let's download the generated model as an
STL file and bring it into Microsoft 3D builder which is another free program as long as you
have access to a Windows PC immediately 3D builder recognizes some issues with the model
so we'll click this box to automatically repair it for 3D printing that's a really powerful tool
and while it's turning away here's a look at the frame I designed for the lithophane in Fusion 360
this is just a five millimeter thick frame with the edges tapering in and we're going
to combine this with the lithophane we just made so that it can nestle nicely into our snowflake
I'll save this as an STL so I can bring it into 3D Builder with our lithophane and I'll align
it lying flat on our ground plane I've already modeled the frame to be the correct scale so we
just need to scale our lithophane to fit inside we do want to maintain the z thickness of three
millimeters here but for now we'll scale this uniformly to position it inside of the hexagon
then we can click this little lock to turn off the uniform scaling and just stretch the z height
back to 3 millimeters so the lithophane prints properly next we can use the settle tool on each
part individually to ensure that they're laying completely flat on our ground plane and then we'll
select the lithophane and raise it one millimeter along the z-axis to center it inside of our frame
now that everything is lined up correctly we want to join the parts so we'll start by selecting the
frame and using the cut command to save it to our clipboard paste it back in place and then use the
subtract command to trim the lithophane we'll use the paste command again to bring back our frame
and then we can delete those trimmed edges before joining the two remaining parts we want to ensure
that their boundaries are slightly overlapping so we'll select the lithophane once more scale it up
just a tiny bit and then do a non-uniform scale to bring the z-axis back to three millimeters
finally we can select both parts and then run the merge command that leaves us with a single
solid mesh so let's just orient this standing up again to prepare it for printing and then we
can save it as an STL now it's time to slice and i'll be using CURA slicer for this print
since it has some useful settings that make for better lithophanes for one thing we can turn on
user specified z seam alignment and make sure that the seam is not running through the image here you
can see some of those seam gaps visualized on the lithophane so we'll want to tweak those settings
I'm going to turn the model slightly so one edge is clearly facing the back left
corner of the build plate and I'll set the seam position to that back corner
let's also make sure to set the infill to 100 percent and I'll use a two wall line count let's
slice and preview that again and this time we have that perfect seam running along this edge
and the infill is solid throughout which should make for a good lithophane
always inspect your slicer previews that can prevent a lot of unnecessary failed prints
so I printed these up on my Ender 7 3D printer it's a super rigid machine using a core X-Y setup
on linear rails so I figured it's appropriate for these lithophanes surely enough they printed out
really well I used a few different filaments and the more opaque white definitely casts a
stronger image while the milkier white has this soft glow so it could be a matter of preference
with that half of the equation done let's move on to the laser cutting
I found these sheets of milky white acrylic at a second hand store and at
five millimeters thick I think they're just at the limit of what my Laserbox can cut through
I laid out several pieces in the Laserbox software and ran it with my previous settings for thick
acrylic which is basically a very slow cut at 90 power the laser was just barely making it through
and oftentimes the smaller details got so hot that they melted back together
I was having my fair share of failed cuts so I ended up cutting small squares of acrylic
to cut each snowflake individually after a while I realized that I could get more consistent results
by doing several faster passes with the laser that way the acrylic doesn't get so hot while cutting
that strategy gave me some fairly clean cuts and
our lithophanes popped perfectly into place with a friction fit
we can already see the lithophane effect here and when we hang this in front of
a window we get a really clear image and the snowflake itself seems to glow
awesome so here's our first snowflake ornament and by combining technologies we were able to
make it extra unique with that 3D printed lithophane in the center and the very clean
classy snowflake frame now that's not all we can do here since these frames and center pieces can
be easily swapped out and since I already designed the snowflake it was really easy to turn that
into a model for 3D printing I was even able to add a few extra 3D details with these chamfers
and then I figured why not pair that with some laser engraved wooden pieces to go in the center
it was back to the MakeBlock Laserbox for our wooden parts I'm using the three millimeter
basswood sheets that MakeBlock themselves provide so unsurprisingly it cuts super well
I also used the default settings to engrave this image and it came out very crisp but I
was hoping for darker darks and a lot of the subtle shading was lost my second image really
failed and by tweaking the settings I was able to improve the results a bit but to get a real
dark image I thought I might have better luck using my Snapmaker 2.0 and its laser module
I printed these rubber clips for holding things in place on my Snapmaker laser bed I prefer them
a lot over the included pins and they made it really easy to set up my wooden hexagons
the Snapmaker 2.0 stitches together photos to help with alignment in the software and when calibrated
correctly it's quite accurate and very handy once again I'll just be using the default settings
for engraving here and the preview image already looks really great so let's see how this works out
the Snapmaker approaches engraving somewhat differently than the Laserbox this 1600
milliwatt UV laser has a fraction of the power of my CO2 laser so it works more slowly rather
than engraving in sweeping passes this laser pecks at the wood creating an image out of thousands of
little burnt dots it did take 10 times longer to complete but the resulting images also came out
much darker here are my different attempts side by side the Snapmaker engravings are on the top
and the Laserbox ones are on the bottom let me know in the comments which method you prefer
next up was printing the snowflakes I'm using this beautiful Fillamentum Extrafill 'Gold Happens' PLA
and well 3S printing is awesome sometimes so everything just worked out no problem
we'll pop in our center image tie on a loop of golden string and we've got more ornaments
so how cool is that we were able to take one general design this simple snowflake ornament
and by swapping out materials and techniques we made several different totally unique pieces
there's definitely a lot more that can be done with this idea so
I'll have all these files up for you to download and play around with
at myminifactory.com and if you do end up coming up with a fun variation just tag Make Anything
on social media because i'd love to see what you come up with anyways that's going to be it
for today's video thanks so much for joining happy holidays tippI tipmas and as always stay inspired
you