PNG to STL gallery — real conversions, real settings

A symmetrical nemes headdress, uraeus cobra and bead collar turned into a full-bleed gold relief plaque.

This is the classic bas-relief case: the source is already front-facing artwork, so the heightmap needs almost nothing beyond a brightness curve. Because the whole plate is the subject, background detection is switched off — the dark nemes stripes are part of the design, not empty canvas. The stepped stripes on the headdress show exactly where a real machined relief would break into terraces, and the usekh collar at the bottom reads as three concentric rings of beads because that is literally what a concentric gradient does to a height field.

A wide acanthus-and-scroll ornamental panel with a beaded border, the way a CNC carver would leave a furniture or cabinet panel.

Ornamental work is where the heightmap model genuinely beats AI reconstruction: the source is a line drawing, and a line drawing has exactly one correct interpretation — bright strokes become ridges. Nothing is invented. The four corner volutes and the central rosette are separated by broad flat ground, which is what gives the panel its crisp read; the beaded border sits proud of the field so it survives a 0.4 mm nozzle. Use this case to judge edge quality, since scrollwork is where stair-stepping shows up first.

A hard-edged ring-and-column mark embossed into a clay-coloured plaque — the medal and nameplate use case.

Logos are the highest-confidence input there is: flat vector-like art with hard edges and a small colour range. No smoothing is applied here, because any blur at all rounds the corners you spent hours drawing. If your own logo comes out soft, that is almost always a smoothing setting left over from a photo workflow, not the converter.

A wreath-and-star coin built on the thicker base so the rim survives casting and cleanup.

Coins and tokens want mass, not thinness, so this is the one case using the thick base. The rounded edge means the rim survives tumbling and casting — a sharp rim on a coin-sized part chips off during cleanup. Wreath leaves are thin, which is why the edge subdivision is doing real work here: it is what keeps a low feature from being swallowed by the bevel.

A wide landscape with three snow-capped peaks layered into the slope — the classic backlit wall panel.

Landscapes work as heightmaps because the tonal bands in a photo or painting already describe depth: sky is brightest and tallest, snow caps are next, rock face is dark and low. The deep edge radius on this one is what creates the soft rounded terraces you see on the slopes; turn it down and the range reads as a stepped pyramid. This is also the case to copy if you are making a backlit lamp — invert it and the sky becomes the recess instead.

A 20×20 pixel heart blown up into chunky blocky geometry — sprites and game icons keep their sharp edges.

Low-resolution art is the best stress test for stair-stepping. At 20×20 the converter produces hard blocky terraces, and because the source is tiny the triangle count stays low. Pixel art is also the one case where you generally want no smoothing and no bevel: the whole point is the hard edge. If you want the same look from a low-res image and get mush instead, turn smoothing to 0 and drop edge radius to 0.

A shaded portrait converted with the lithophane curve, where white light reveals the face through the material.

A relief and a lithophane are the same geometry with two different height mappings, which is the single most misunderstood thing in this category. A relief uses a linear brightness-to-height curve. A lithophane uses an exponential one, because white PLA absorbs roughly half its light per millimetre — so contrast has to be pushed exponentially or the shadows never appear. Two smoothing passes are used here to kill the pixel noise that would otherwise blur the face at shallow depths. Print this one at 0.8–1.0 mm total thickness with a light behind it, not on the bed face-up.