3D Relief Generator — Turn a Picture Into a Printable Relief
Drop a picture and take a .stl relief: brightness becomes height, and the mesh is closed with a base plate so a slicer accepts it. Free, no account, and the image never leaves your device.
No relief yet. Drop an image below and press build.
What the relief generator actually does
It is a height map, not a guess: every pixel's brightness sets the height of one point on the surface, and the whole thing is closed into a solid.
Brightness becomes height
The image is read with the Rec. 709 luma formula, so the surface tracks what your eye reads as light and dark rather than a crude channel average.
It comes out watertight
The relief grid, a flat plate and four walls are stitched together, so every edge is shared by exactly two triangles — a slicer takes it without a repair pass.
Depth and base you control
Two sliders: how far the relief rises, and how thick the plate under it is. Invert the map if you want the dark areas raised instead.
The picture stays yours
The image is read into a canvas in this tab and never sent anywhere. Family photos and client artwork are as safe here as they are on your disk.
No login wall in front of a file you already own
Opening or editing a file you made yourself should not require an account. It does not here, and there is no upgrade prompt waiting at the end of it either.
No account, ever
There is no signup form on this site at all. Nothing to verify, no email, and no saved library holding your work hostage on a later visit.
No size ceiling
Server-backed tools cap uploads because bandwidth costs money. Nothing is uploaded here, so the only limit is what your own device can hold.
No queue
Work starts the moment the file is parsed. There is no job to submit, so there is nothing to wait behind and nothing to poll.
How to turn an image into a 3D relief
Pick a high-contrast picture
Portraits, logos, coins and line art work best. A flat, evenly lit photo with a clear subject beats a dramatic one with deep shadows.
Set depth and base
Depth decides how far the relief rises; base is the plate under it. Both are relative to a 100-unit-wide plate, so scale the whole thing once in your slicer.
Build and download
Press build, orbit the preview, then take the
.stl. If it looks inverted, tick the invert box and build it again — nothing is charged, because nothing costs anything.
A relief is not a 3D model of the subject. It is the picture pushed out of a flat plate, which is exactly right for a plaque, a coin or a lithophane and quite wrong if you wanted the object itself. For that, use the generator below and then convert the result to STL.
Make a 3D model right here
You do not have to go back to the home page. Type a prompt or drop an image, and take the .glb — free, anonymous, no watermark.
3D relief generator — frequently asked questions
A bas-relief is a flat plate with the image raised out of it, like the face on a coin. Bright pixels become high points and dark pixels stay low, so the picture reads as a shallow sculpture rather than as a full 3D object.
It is closed and manifold, which is the part that usually goes wrong: the surface, the base plate and the side walls are stitched into one solid. You will still want to scale it in your slicer, and very thin reliefs on a coarse nozzle can lose detail.
High contrast and a clear subject. Logos, line art, portraits on a plain background and anything with strong light-to-dark separation all come out well. Busy scenes turn into noise, because every bit of that noise becomes geometry.
Depth is how far the brightest pixels rise above the plate; base is how thick the plate itself is. The mesh is built on a 100-unit-wide plate, so treat the numbers as proportions and set the real size once in your slicer.
No. The image is decoded into a canvas inside this tab, sampled there, and the mesh is written in memory. Nothing is transmitted, so a private photo stays private.
A lithophane is the same idea printed thin and lit from behind, so the thickness variation shows as brightness. Invert the map, keep the depth modest and print in white filament and this generator makes one.
More free tools
All of them run in the browser, all of them free, none of them behind a login.
Want the object, not the relief?
The generator below turns a sentence or a photo into a full 3D model in about ninety seconds — free, anonymous, no watermark.
FreeNo signupNothing uploadedNo watermark