Turn your photo into a 3D-printable halftone art

Pointilex is an encoder: it turns pixels into tiles. What you do with those tiles is up to you: the direct route gives you the finished plate, the configurator route keeps everything inside MakerWorld.

Bigger than your build plate? The multi-plate pack splits the artwork into one 3MF per plate and adds an assembly guide. The dithering is computed on the whole image before splitting, so the texture runs continuously across the seams, and the white border is applied only to the outer perimeter, so the internal edges butt together cleanly.

There is no colour mixing on the plate. Each tile is one solid, unmixed filament. The mixing happens in your eye: this is partitive optical mixing, the same effect the pointillists used: put a red dot next to a yellow one, step back, and you see orange. Pointilex chooses which filament goes in each cell with Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion computed in CIE Lab space, so the error is distributed the way human vision actually perceives it, not the way RGB numbers behave.

Every colour inside the triangle below is reachable as a weighted average of just five spools. White and charcoal set the lightness axis; yellow, red and marine blue set the hue reach. Vivid green, cyan and magenta fall outside. That is the honest limit of a five-filament palette, and it is why the Spool Bank exists: declare the spools you actually own and the encoder picks the combination that covers your image best.

How far away should you stand? Human visual acuity is roughly one arcminute, so two dots stop resolving separately at about 3400 times their spacing. With the standard 0.8 mm pitch that is around 2.5 m; with a 0.5 mm pitch (0.2 mm nozzle) the picture already resolves at about 1.7 m. Closer than that, the artwork reads as a texture of dots, which is precisely the point.

A multi-material Bambu printer (AMS, AMS lite or H2 series). All the colours sit on the same layer band, so the machine changes filament within each layer. This cannot be done by hand. Matte PLA is strongly recommended: it kills specular reflections, and reflections are what stop dots from blending.

Filament use and print time scale with the area, not with the number of colours: a postcard is a short print, a wall panel is an evening. Purge waste depends on your slicer settings and is the one figure worth tuning before a large job.

Five public-domain masterpieces are published as finished, print-ready models: The Great Wave, the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night, The Kiss by Hayez and Klimt, each in three formats. Print one to see the effect in your hands before encoding your own photo.

The encoder is developed continuously and every feature is checked on real prints before it goes live. The main steps so far.