Two routes to the same STL: Blender's modifier stack, or a browser conversion you can run right now.
Convert an image to STLIf you typed image to stl blender, you already know the long way: import the picture, subdivide a plane, drive a displacement modifier, export, then discover the mesh is either too coarse or too heavy. This page covers the browser route that skips all of that, and the Blender route for when you genuinely need it. Either way you finish with one file, an STL sized in millimetres, ready for your slicer.
Two kinds of people land here. The first has a logo, a coin, a lithophane photo or a relief map and wants a printable mesh today, not a modelling session. The second already uses Blender and wants to know whether importing an image as a plane and displacing it is still the right call. The answer depends on how much control you need over height, resolution and the final triangle count.
Every conversion is one of these three ideas, in some combination.
Each pixel's luminance is read as a Z value, so white sits near the top of the relief and black rests on the bed. Convert the file to greyscale first and you are effectively authoring the height map by hand.
Where alpha or a contrast cutoff gives a clean edge, the shape is traced and pushed up to a fixed thickness. Logos, silhouettes, stamps and keychains come out as flat plates with vertical walls.
The detail setting controls how many samples are taken across the image, and every sample becomes geometry. More detail means a smoother surface and a larger file.
Order matters here, because most failed conversions trace back to a step that was rushed.
Crop to the subject and convert to 8-bit greyscale. Fix the contrast so the brightest area you want raised is genuinely near white. JPEG compression leaves blotches, and those blotches become bumps in the mesh.
Relief suits photographs, terrain and lithophanes. Outline suits logos and single-colour drawings. Picking the wrong one gives you either a smeared plate or a shape with no thickness.
Enter the width in millimetres and the height follows the image's aspect ratio. Keep total relief depth between 1 mm and 3 mm, since a 0.2 mm layer height cannot resolve a step much finer than that.
A 1000 by 1000 sampling grid is a million quads, roughly two million triangles. That will slice, but it opens slowly and repairs slowly. Drop the detail or decimate after export if your slicer complains.
Open the STL in your slicer and check it is manifold and sitting flat on the bed. Slice relief work between 0.12 mm and 0.2 mm. Scale anything narrower than about 40 mm before you print it, not after.
STL is geometry only. There is no colour and no texture inside the file, so a colour photograph becomes a height field or a silhouette, never a coloured object. If you want colour, it lives in the print rather than the model: swap filament partway through, or paint the finished piece. Nothing in the conversion can preserve the original palette.
Image quality sets the ceiling. Flat, low-contrast photos produce flat relief. Harsh shadows read as ridges. A drawing with anti-aliased edges gives you a slope where you wanted a wall. You can repair some of that in an image editor before converting, but depth inferred from a single photograph is inference, not measurement.
Blender earns its place when the shape needs real editing. Smoothing a noisy height field, decimating to a target triangle count, boolean-cutting a mount, repairing non-manifold edges, or exporting at a specific unit scale are all easier with proper modelling tools in front of you. If you need that control, build it in Blender. If you only need the file, do it here.
Drop in a JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, SVG or HEIC file up to 20MB, pick relief or outline, set the width in millimetres, and download an STL. It runs in the browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, with no install and no account.
Yes. The built-in Images as Planes add-on imports a picture as a flat mesh, then a Subdivision Surface modifier and a Displace modifier driven by that same image push the surface up and down. You finish with File > Export > STL. It works, but you are managing subdivision levels, texture coordinates and file size by hand.
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Skip the complex modeling software. Upload your image now and get a print-ready STL file instantly.
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