I'm already annoyed by the marketing to call it fullspectrum - this seems to promise more than demonstrated. Maybe call it "CMYK printing"? I was hoping to see them printing a photograph (either on a horizontal or on a vertical surface, unlikely to work well on a ball). I was also missing a continuous gradient - so far, only colored patches?<p>I'm hoping for the next innovation with mixed extrusion to reduce print times. We are lacking an automatic extrusion amount and nozzle size mixing within a "layer". Not just fine layers everywhere with mixed colors on the inside.<p>Goal: print the infill and inner perimeter from a larger nozzle and thick layer height. Use the fine nozzle and fancy layer-mixing only on the outside where needed. It is not going to be strict layers any more - I understand, this makes it difficult certainly. Then the Prusa printers could shine that exchange fully loaded and pre heated print heads quickly.<p>Until then, I'll happily wait for 2 days to get a spool of orange filament delivered.. Instead of waiting for a 20hour print job
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Hmm, I am not in the 3D printer space anymore, but I am surprised they went with alternating layer per layer, as that severely limits resolution. It's probably the simplest way to achieve reproducible results, but I can think of a few other ways:<p>* the simplest is just mixing filaments, like one mixes paint. The article doesn't spell out the reason it doesn't work, I am curious as to why.<p>* together with alternating layers, colors could be alternated in the same layer. Some purging may be necessary, but I think you could either: accept some mixing (compute its impact to compensate) / take into account the volume in the nozzle (extrusion "latency") / discard the unwanted part in the infill (at the cost of less smooth edges)<p>Of course, the hard work with any approach, including their current work, is calibration, as the article highlights. I wonder if off-the-shelf monitor calibration sensors could help with measuring the filament you have at hand.
>the simplest is just mixing filaments, like one mixes paint. The article doesn't spell out the reason it doesn't work, I am curious as to why.<p>This requires you to control both filaments independently directly at the extruder. Dual direct drive for a single nozzle sounds like an engineering nightmare. The extruder head is going to be huge.<p>There is also the obvious problem of how to stirr the filament. Printing temperatures aren't hot enough to turn the plastic liquid, they just make it soft enough to drip out the nozzle. This means you can't just feed the filaments at continuos rates, you will have to use a PWM scheme where you extrude the first filament and then the second filament in extremely small discrete increments. That switching will give you the necessary agitation without building a throwaway nozzle that can't be cleaned after a clog.<p>All of this sounds like it would take at least a year for a well equipped research department to figure out. It's definitely not the simplest solution.<p>EDIT: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3v2/comments/ssuw3i/my_crazy_project_a_dual_color_dual_direct_drive/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3v2/comments/ssuw3i/my_crazy_p...</a><p>Just the hot end of this extruder costs $70 alone. This is definitely not going to be cheap to do.
It would be nice if additional colours would be supported, à la Hexachrome by Pantone (this was a 6-colour ink system which covered more than half of the PANTONE spot ink colour space and made quite vivid photo reproduction possible).<p>Even better would be a mechanism like to Cerilica's Truism which would allow one to use arbitrary filaments and preview how they will blend when printed.
They’re not limiting you, the community work this is based on doesn’t either. Yeah they’re going to sell sets for easy use but it’s just color mixing. If you know the filament colors, which is what the filament database is for, you’ve got all the info you need.<p>And you’re only limited in quantity by how many filaments you can load at once. A full INDX setup on a Core One is 8. I thought you could daisy chain Bambu AMS units on their printers, which would let you get your 16 maybe? I’m not very familiar with their offerings.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZe5zvMEsp0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZe5zvMEsp0</a><p><a href="https://primed3d.com/" rel="nofollow">https://primed3d.com/</a><p>primed3d can do photos onto models. still limited by print resolution, but very cool concept.
Photo reproduction should be the target here...<p>And it looks like the software support needs work too - the obvious way to do it is being done able to import a jpeg or png to project or wrap onto the surface, a bit like texture maps in video games.
> Photo reproduction should be the target here...<p>There's an app called Hueforge that produces models that color mix to reproduce photos:<p><a href="https://shop.thehueforge.com/" rel="nofollow">https://shop.thehueforge.com/</a><p>It's been around for years. There are databases of filaments with their TD values and color measurements to use. The blog really sells Prusa's attempts to do this with their own PLA, but there's a long history of color mixing in the community with extensive measurements of filaments that anyone interested should check out, too.
I thought Prusa only has a five color print head switcher.
This is exactly what I was hoping for to knock Bambu down a few notches.... Definitely makes Prusa an even better contender in the space.
Does anyone know what file format they are storing the color information in?<p>Seems like the volumetric extension of 3mf files could support it. That would make cross slicer file mgmt easier.
This looks awesome! Exciting to see what happens in this space.
I’ve always liked the idea of multi-color. But one of the big mental stumbling blocks for me was needing so many colors. I’m not the kind of person who does a lot of 3-D printing and can justify having a wall of different filaments just to put a different colored label on top of a part.<p>When I first saw this pop-up in the community it was clear this was a fix. No it’s not as good as owning a roll of some specific color, but for a ton of use cases it’s absolutely good enough or maybe even perfect.<p>It made me want an INDX all over again, now thinking I should buy more heads. I knew they’d jump on, I’m glad it’s this early so it will be available by the time mine arrives.<p>I’m sure this is a huge boon for them, Snapmaker’s U1, and the new Bambu with more than 2 heads. HUGE value add just through software. Speed difference between those and MMU/AMS is now more important than ever if you want this.
I recently started playing around with my Palette 3 again
(on a MK3.5S). It’s an amazing piece of engineering that has a reputation for being frustrating to use. It’s now discontinued but Mosaic still sell spare parts and it’s designed to be stripped down and repaired. Despite the problems, it was built by good engineers - it uses one torx head for all screws (and comes with a driver). The next printer I get will probably be an INDX system though, the future is multitool.<p>I had written it off, because of how irritating Mosaic’s cloud slicer is. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it works with a fork of P2PP (vhspace/p2pp), a post processor for PrusaSlicer that is completely local. All it does is swap out the filament change commands with Palette splice instructions. I fixed a few gcode interpreter bugs that solved the issues I had with bed calibration and extrusion, and even splicing seems quite reliable. I’ve been using it for simple 2-color same-brand prints that would require a lot of manual changing, so not complex but it’s much nicer to use than an MMU2.<p>I’m excited to try this out for sure.
I can imagine filament vendors making bundles of filaments with interesting mixes of colors. CMYKW is an obvious one, but there must be other color combinations that will mix in interesting ways.
They also mentioned that they hadn’t started testing sparkle filament, glowing filament, etc. yet.<p>I bet people somewhere find some very interesting special effects all this could bring with the right odd combinations.
INDX anticipation intensifies!
it's very cool stuff but sorte by definition <i>not</i> 'full-spectrum' :p
There's a growing community around the OrcaSlicer - Full Spectrum fork that started all of this, which is attributed in the article. It's a cool technique and I expect all of the mainstream slicers will have it soon. You could already do this technique with OrcaSlicer with Prusa printers or cheaper options like the Snapmaker U1<p>The "Prusa ColorMix Cones" model is not what I'd recommend. I don't know why they made it like that for 3 and 4 colors other than to do something different than what the community was already doing. For 4 colors the PeggyPallette mini they used as inspiration is a much better model: <a href="https://makerworld.com/en/models/2519356-peggypalette-mini-38-color-full-spectrum-tester" rel="nofollow">https://makerworld.com/en/models/2519356-peggypalette-mini-3...</a> You specifically want the dome shape to visualize how the layers blend at different angles. The fixed angle of the cones in the Prusa model misses the point and I don't know why they did that other than to be different.<p>The article goes on at length about their filament mixing model which sounds cool until you see the part that they only tested with Prusament PLA. Again, I think the open source community was already doing a good job with this.<p>There are several filament databases other than the one they're linking to that have TD values, which sprang out of the HueForge community. There are cheap tools from small makers to measure TD and color, too. One database: <a href="https://3dfilamentprofiles.com/" rel="nofollow">https://3dfilamentprofiles.com/</a><p>I'm glad they gave attribution to some of the sources of all of these ideas, but to be completely honest it's getting a little tiring to see everything the open source communities do get wrapped up, prefixed with a Prusa- brand prefix, and resold to us. Make sure you look beyond the Prusa official everything to get a sense of what the community is doing with all of this. I know I'm going to get downvoted for saying anything that isn't 100% pro-Prusa, but this is one topic where the open source community is quite a bit ahead and it's worth looking at what's out there.
What’s wrong with not using the community model for their internal tests? I’m sure they have a good reason. It can’t possibly be just NIH.<p>Yeah they’re focusing on their filaments but that’s their product. It would be weird if they didn’t start there. Plus they’re working with the open filament database that as established to go with the open source NFC tags they cooperated with other companies on. That seems sand too.<p>Ok they’ve only done PLA so far, is that such a big deal? This is an announcement not a release. They’re still working on all of it.<p>And it seemed to me like they did a great job giving the community credit in the post. They made it clear it all came from the community, including the entire idea, and they’re building on that and giving back.
> What’s wrong with not using the community model for their internal tests? I’m sure they have a good reason. It can’t possibly be just NIH<p>The problem with their models is that it's a cone shape. The angle is fixed.<p>The community models are domed so you can see the effect at different angles.<p>> Plus they’re working with the open filament database that as established to go with the open source NFC tags they cooperated with other companies on.<p>Right, but they're steering people back their sources when the community sites have more user-submitted coverage and it's what we've all been using successfully already.<p>I probably shouldn't have said anything given the topic and the audience. I know they gave some credit, but there's a long history in the 3D printing world of this stuff happening.