<p>I have noticed major watches watch brands do not seem to offer manuals to 3D print your own parts.</p>
<p>Is there a reason for this?</p>
<p>I would assume in this day and age, with <a href="https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/Occupations/occupation-profile.aspx?keyword=Watch%20repairers&amp;onetcode=49906400&amp;location=US" rel="nofollow noreferrer">watch repair a dying profession</a>, transitioning parts to 3D printing would be a logical next step (notice luxury watches are still very popular but <a href="https://monochrome-watches.com/top-50-swiss-watch-brands-2020-market-share-sales-editorial/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">also fluctuating</a>).</p>
<p>I have found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8AvZnqt5NE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">minimal information</a> on 3D printing watches.  Maybe there is another name for this science and it's not typically fit for 3D printing?  It appears some <a href="https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/2127463/how-3d-printing-changing-swiss-luxury-watchmaking" rel="nofollow noreferrer">purists</a> aren't into 3D printing.  So it appears watch parts are <a href="https://www.productionmachining.com/articles/keeping-watch-on-small-parts" rel="nofollow noreferrer">machined</a> except for the small parts.</p>

[{'answer_id': 16442, 'author': 'Zeiss Ikon', 'author_id': 28508, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/28508', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>FreeCAD can import JPG (and IIRC TIFF and PNG as well) image files and produce a lithophane type height-map based on the brightness of each pixel.  I'd be rather surprised if other 3D CAD software aimed at the 3D printing user base couldn't do the same.  Most of the common free-to-use 3D CAD packages have Linux versions; FreeCAD certainly does (I use it on Kubuntu 20.04, and it should work on any recent version of any flavor of Debian-based Linux, if your hardware meets it requirements).</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 16446, 'author': 'user10489', 'author_id': 28397, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/28397', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The OpenSCAD <code>surface</code> function will do this.  You can feed it a greyscale image or a textfile containing a matrix.  Documentation and examples can be found at <a href="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Other_Language_Features#Surface" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Other_Language_Features#Surface</a></p>\n<p>OpenSCAD is a cross platform free open source cad package.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 18320, 'author': 'alecail', 'author_id': 18571, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/18571', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Cura will import a picture and use it as a heightmap to build a 3d object.<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMb0F.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fMb0F.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>\n<p>There are a few options available when importing :<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7xmEU.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7xmEU.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>\n<p>You can even export back the data as STL if you need to process the mesh. Here is the mesh exported in STL, opened in SideFX Houdini: <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/F8AGV.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/F8AGV.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>\n'}]
['https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/questions/16453', 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com', 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/8854/']