Everything you open a slicer for, before you open the slicer.
Drop a file in and the toolkit answers the questions you actually have. How big is it, what will it cost, will it fit, and is the mesh even printable.
It opens STL, OBJ, 3MF, PLY, FBX, GLB, glTF and DAE, and it opens STEP and IGES straight out of CAD, which most viewers this side of a paid licence will not do.
Open the toolkit- Measure
- Bounding box, volume, surface area and triangle count, in millimetres or inches.
- Cost and time
- Real mesh volume against your infill, walls, layer height and filament price.
- Fits my printer?
- Your bed dimensions, checked in every orientation, with the rotation that saves it.
- Repair
- Finds every open edge loop and closes it. Counts what cannot be closed instead of pretending.
- Scale and convert
- Resize by factor or target size, re-orient, and export STL, OBJ or 3MF.
- Layer view
- Slide through the height to see the print build up, the way the printer will do it.
A photo is just a thickness map.
Thick where the picture is dark, thin where it is light. Put a lamp behind it and the image comes back. The Lithophane Maker does that conversion from a JPG or PNG and hands you a watertight STL, with a frame so the plate does not curl off the bed.
Make a lithophaneWhy it runs in the browser
Your model stays on your machine
There is no server doing the work. The file is read, parsed and rendered by your own browser, so a prototype you cannot hand to a third party is safe to open here.
Nothing to install
No 400 MB download, no plugin, no login. It behaves the same on a laptop you do not own as on your own.
Fast enough for real files
Big meshes load in seconds, and the viewer stays smooth while you orbit, section by layer and measure.
Free, and staying free
These tools cost nothing to run, so they cost nothing to use. If something bigger shows up later it will be an extra, not a paywall in front of this.
Questions
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. Both tools read the file locally with the browser's own file APIs and do the geometry work in JavaScript on your machine. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no account or database on the other end.
Which file formats can I open?
Meshes: STL (binary and ASCII), OBJ, 3MF, PLY, FBX, GLB, glTF and DAE. CAD: STEP, IGES and BREP, read by a real CAD kernel compiled to WebAssembly, which downloads once the first time you open one. Export is STL, OBJ or 3MF, so the toolkit doubles as a converter, including CAD to printable mesh. The Lithophane Maker takes JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF images and exports STL.
How accurate is the filament cost estimate?
It is computed from the real mesh volume, your infill percentage, wall count, layer height and the price and density of your filament, so it lands close for solid parts. A slicer still knows more than this page does about supports, brims and travel moves, so treat the number as a quote rather than a guarantee.
What does the repair tool actually fix?
It finds every open edge loop in the mesh and closes it with new triangles, which is what makes a model watertight enough to slice. It also welds duplicate vertices, drops degenerate triangles and orients every face outward. Non-manifold edges it counts and reports, because those cannot be patched by filling a hole, so it tells you rather than pretending.
What settings make a good lithophane?
A high-contrast photo, 0.8 mm at the thinnest point and about 3 mm at the thickest, printed in white PLA at a 0.1 mm layer height with 100% infill. Print it standing vertically if you want the layer lines to disappear into the image.