So I shared this video recently and I wanted todo a behind the scenes of how I did it.

I started with this project because I made a cool case on makerworld here. A few people asked to buy them as they didn’t have a printer so I set up an Etsy shop and took some professional photos which came out great:

When I flicked through the photos they were really satisfying they stayed in the same place every time so I figured I’d try make a flip-book animation for these!

My first thought was ChatGPT could generate an animation, but this really sucked! So I had to learn animation. I used an app called Flipaclip and after about 10 hours I had a draft, and another 20 hours I polished the animation.

Now the boring bit, converting!

I had to convert the frames from PNG in to SVG (used an AI called Vectorizer.AI todo this step). Then using Fusion360 I imported the SVGs and extruded them 0.05mm to make a slight indent on the case. I then exported the STL from Fusion into Bambu Studio (3D printer slicer) and used the color painter to color the animation in, I could then print this on my A1 printer with 4 color reals.

I then repeated these steps 108 times! This took about 2 weeks of printing and converting. In total you need to convert animation > PNGs > SVGs > STLS > 3MF > GCode, then image the cases and JPEG > MP4 Movie.

Once I finally had all of the cases printed, I printed an orange pillow phone holder and stuck this down in my light box, set the camera up on a tripod and began imaging. It took around 2 hours for this (though I did it twice, the first time I had a white pillow and it didn’t look amazing so I retook ALL of the images at my girlfriends annoyance).

I tried a few tests editing on Filmora and Capcut, both were a pain to use, and expensive monthly subscriptions. So I learnt a new editing software called DaVinci Resolve which was free and great for syncing up the pictures to the music.

Overall moderately happy with the result, though I know a lot of shortcuts and improvements now if I was to do it again in the future, but it taught me several bits of new software.

Final note

I put this on NOTHING reddit and 3D printing one, the NOTHING community had so many positive things to say and really encouraging. Posting on r/3DPrinting I had 25+ comments all of them negative before I deleted the post an hour later. I like this community!