Topoform.
One photo, three printable objects, each sized to your printer.
Your hardware sets the millimetres, not a preset
Bed size bounds the footprint. Nozzle diameter sets the analysis pitch. Layer height sets the floor below which detail cannot print. Your loaded filaments become the material plan: four slots for a terrain model or a carved panel, one translucent spool for a lithophane. Enter your printer once and every model after that already fits it.
Shaped by erosion, pressure, and flow
Brightness-as-height gives you a shallow plaque. Topographic Flow reads composition instead: a pressure field from image salience, form recovered from the artwork's own shading, texture streaked along its fibre directions, then a stream-power erosion pass that carves a drainage network into the surface. Pick Tidewater, Massif, Weather, or Aureole, or leave it on Auto and the engine scores every candidate and keeps the strongest.
A bas-relief with walls cut to what your printer can hold
Carved Panel reads the same picture as a carving. A phase field separates figure from ground, walls are cut at the slope cap, and the artwork's own line work survives as tool marks. Five styles run from Pressed Brocade, one even plateau over a dead-flat ground for the embossed-lid look, through Carved Line, Sculpted Foam, and Soft Vellum to Deep Intaglio. Add a rim and the panel becomes a gift-box lid or a framed plaque.
A backlit plate, where tone becomes thickness
Lithophane reads your artwork as light. One translucent plate encodes tone as thickness, so thin glows bright and thick reads dark, all held inside a printable thickness window. Gamma, contrast, and a bounded low-relief layer can shape the plate only while they keep the image's tonal order, and that order is measured again on the exported mesh. Four presets run from Pure Lithophane, tone straight to thickness, through Classic and Sculpted to Dramatic.
A mesh that fails a check is not passed off as done
Before it hands you a file, Topoform re-reads its own 3MF: watertight, manifold, correctly wound, inside your bed and slope cap, triangles above a quality floor, and in the colour modes a cap deep enough to stay opaque. Each relief mode adds its own fidelity contract on top. For terrain and carved panels, a supported slicer on your Mac that rejects the file also stops the export; a lithophane records the slicer's verdict as evidence. Any failed check stops the export and names itself.
Presets for an Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 with CANVAS, a Bambu Lab X1C with AMS, a Prusa MK4S with MMU3, a two-head Prusa XL, and a generic single extruder. Or type in your own usable bed, nozzle, layer height, and slot count.
Keep a rack of filaments with a name, colour, material, and finish: matte, silk, glossy, or translucent. Slot assignments map straight onto the relief's colour channels, so the plan matches the machine.
The analysis pitch is a third of your nozzle diameter, held between 0.10 and 0.20 mm: about 0.13 mm on a standard 0.4 mm nozzle. Relief finer than one layer height is not modelled; its share of the slope budget goes to detail the printer can hold.
Process runs the surface stage in minutes and shows the sculpted result, its contact sheet, and a print estimate. The full mesh and 3MF are built only when you press Export. No artwork to hand? The Try the sample button loads a bundled test picture with its lithophane surface already processed.
Orogeny, Alluvium, and Atmosphere each move three variables together along smooth curves, so you adjust how the relief reads instead of reconciling three numbers. Every hard gate is measured again on the sculpted surface.
Multi-material reliefs are dominated by tool-change purging. Set a print-time budget and Topoform estimates the print from the processed geometry, counting tool changes and extruded volume, then offers a height that fits.
Export writes a 3MF, a 16-bit height map, a contact sheet, and a JSON report with every measured number behind the verdict. For terrain and carved panels the sheet shows the four-material topology, hypsometric relief, slope field, gallery views, and a cross-section. For a lithophane it shows wall thickness, a simulated backlight, and tone order.
Connect a cloud model account under your own key, or a model server running on your Mac, then ask for art direction or open the studio chat. The chat can propose a whole build (mode, style, height, rim, print budget, sculpt) that you apply in one click. Keys live in your macOS Keychain. Connect nothing and Topoform makes no network connection of its own.
Passing means the mesh Topoform wrote met its mode's geometry and fidelity contract, and for terrain and carved panels that no supported slicer on your Mac rejected it. It does not mean the print will succeed. Filament mapping, purge settings, orientation, supports, bed adhesion, and the decision to press start stay with you and your slicer, as they should.