Converting images into 3D models for 3D printing

Abstract

3D printing has grown a lot of interest through the years since 2009 and image processing softwares are getting better and better in creating 3D mesh objects. One aspect in the field that is lacking at the moment is the ability to convert a 2D image into 3D mesh object. This report presents a software which will accept an image as input and generate a 3D model as its output. Conversion process are largely categorised into two methods. The first method converts the 2D image into grayscale and uses the grayscale values to generate the height or Z-axis and create the 3D mesh. The second method is converting the 2D image into the brightness value which maps the colours into a range of 0 to 1. The first method restricts the interaction of the user with the software as it is difficult to assign a definite value to each grayscale value. The second method allows interaction to happen as the Z-axis can now be given a definite value from the user as the range of the ratio is from 0 to 1.