Lightbox issue gaps after vectorising image

[w177]

Hi,

I am hoping someone will be able to help, I am new to the 3D print processes, so please bear with me, but I have started to try and make a few lightboxes through the maker world.

I have got my image, looks fine when I examine it and zoom in, no gaps.

I then upload it and it adds gaps around the border as seen, these gaps show as white in the colour match too, so they will print out unlike potential pinholes.
I have added two images of the gaps and an image of the border before which clearly shows no gaps.

Is someone able to explain why this happens and how to rectify.

Thanks for your help in advance.

[waynejohns1973]

As someone who has printed and sold 100’s of lightboxes, there are a couple of possibilities here.

Are these actual gaps or white print in the colour match?

When uploading your image in to the lightbox maker it matches colours in numerous shades.

When you reduce the number of colours, it often get’s these shades wrong.

As an example. My Avatar has only 4 colours. Red, White, Blue and Black.

When loading in to LightBoxMaker (LBM) it assigns 11 colours

When I reduce it down to 4, I get this

Manually changing the colours gives this

Which looks fine until you zoom in

There shouldn’t be, and never has been Blue in the W.

There are 2 options to solve this.

1. a better quality higher definition starting image
2. zoom in to the pic and click on the offending wrong colour. It will then let you change the colour of that part, to one already selected. This will give you a perfect colour match, although it can be very time consuming on larger images which started with more colours and different shades.

It will show you which colour the part is currently selected. Here blue, simply click the red, and it will change the offending piece to the intended colour.

If the issue is actual gaps in the print, this is likely due to your nozzle size not being fine enough to get into the sharp turns. If you can’t reduce the nozzle size, you may not be able to get the definition you want.

My solution to this is to use the diffuser option.

This can put a single solid layer over the back of the print. It won’t eradicate the tiny pinhole gaps, but it will make them less obvious to see as you won’t get the bright light shining through.

Hope that helps?

[w177]

Hi

Thanks for the update, I cannot see the white in the original image when I zoom in, it’s black.

When I upload the image it shows the gaps but as a colour, I’m not sure why as that Color isn’t there and I have zoomed in on thr original. I have changed that colour but it also links that with another colour on the image so if I change the colour it changes it elsewhere too.

It’s not the pinholes as I’ve had seen that already.

I didn’t think about the image quality, which wasn’t great, although I did manually edit some of it, or it’s the cropping of the image.

Just thinking if I cropped the image a bit tighter to remove those white bits.

I am new to this and when I seem to crop I’m left with a square box instead of the image shape. Any recommendations on where to crop and what software to edit the image? Or how to crop to the image shape would be great for me to try.

Thanks again

I have re read your post and am I right in thinking that you can zoom in on the colour selection and change a pixel at a time? If so I could try this too.

[MZip]

I see those gaps occasionally when slicing lightbox or lightbox-like images.

I’m only addressing what I see but maybe it’s what is going on in your prints. It’s hard to say for sure from those images.

In tight regions in the print preview, I sometimes see a skipped extrusion line. I think it comes from the slicer trying to follow the line width rules while filling an area. If it’s on the first layer there is a setting for initial layer line width. On higher layers it can be less critical if a lower layer is solid under the gap.

If I see those or other kinds of gaps - especially if they line up from 1st through 3 layers (where I do the lightbox-like features) I just change line widths until they don’t align, go away, or are otherwise resolved to where I get a solid layer.

[w177]

Hi thanks for the reply.

These lines become visible when I load the image on the makerworlds lightbox, they are not there before and from what I understand that’s before it’s sliced, before I have even exported it to bambustudio.