Convert an Image to 3D Object to 3D Print - Simple Edition

Have you ever had a family member draw or design something that you wish you could bring to life, if so I have an easy solution for you.

Now I must confess I have been using this online tooling to bring to life my autistic nephews’ drawings, he is only 7 and is always drawing monsters trucks, Halloween pumpkins and aliens, once I have a photo of one of his designs I use MeshyAI and my 3D printer to create a physical object for him to play with and display which he absolutely adores

Noticing it was the 20-year birthday of Instructibles, I thought I would share some helpful tooling I have used along with giving the little yellow guy some love.

All you need is you computer/laptop, or a smart phone if your prefer, an email address to register with, 3d printer and some inspiration.

Select you image you want to transform from 2D to 3D, this handsome guy will do, I took this image from google. but you can use any images you want.

Note, images with plain or no backgrounds will help the software do its thing the best, too much noise in the background can confuse rendering of the image.

Online there are many different 3D sculpting tools, I use MeshyAI (https://www.meshy.ai) a free online tool that has a huge number of options to create 3D images from text to 3D and image to 3D and more.

It is free to sign up for and you get 100 Coins a month and each image or text to 3D object is 10 Coins, with an optional 10 to render the final object in colour, standard gray is free, and free to download.

Image to 3D is the function we are interest in, as with all free online tool, you can pay extra for more options/coins etc, but I feel this was more than sufficient, and the results speak for itself.

To begin, simply drag and drop or upload your desired image where is asks for itn name your creation tho the AI reads the image and interprets it for you.

Click generate and you are away.

In no time you will be given 4 version on which you will get the option to refine and colour if you wish,

I selected option 4 as it was the best I felt out of the object generated.

I added the option of colour and waited for the image to render.

The completed result is a 3d image that you can look at in a 3D space, if you are happy with it and want to keep it you can download, more on that in the next step.

To download, click the 3 dots and select the format you need and can send him straight to your printer.