Geoffro
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Colour Printing for the masses!
🕑 Added 2017-09-01 07:16:24 +0000 UTC Exciting times ahead!After nearly a year of having to stay quiet, we are glad to finally be able to tell everyone about some exciting changes coming to your desktop! XYZPrinting's new full colour FDM printer!
We have been very fortunate to be selected to test this new technology and are very excited to be able to not only share with you all the juicy details but to also invite you to journey with us as we take that next step in the evolution of 3D printing.
I say evolution because recently, although we have had desktop 3D printers that could print multiple colours, they are cumbersome and require multiple spools of plastic to achieve a color output and even then the colour was dependant on the filament you were using and how it blender to make a certain color.
But this is not that.
What we have now is a fully fledged, full colour FDM, affordable printer that only requires 1 spool of plastic. Yes, you heard, one spool of plastic.
The white plastic is combined with an inkjet technology during the print to achieve virtually an endless array of colours in your prints. So, how do we print colour models?
Well, quite often designers will actually colour their model, paint, texture.. ad materials etc to their model, but until now unless you sent the item to Shapeways it was difficult to get that same result out on the finished FDM print, not anymore!
The Davinci Colour printer will accept OBJ and MTL files! Yes. No external processing, no special programs required to combine the material and model.
So right now, my best advice to any designers out there, is brush up on your UV mapping and texturing of your models. I don't personally use Fusion360, so right now I am unsure as to how it handles materials and textures, but being Autodesk I would assume very well, so if your program can generate UV maps and also a material file, then you are good to go!
We use Blender and Zbrush primarily, but moreso Blender for colour application as the UV mapping system seems more intuitive and visual than ZBR and I will admit, exporting your Polypaint from Zbrush can be difficult if you do not have a low poly version still stored in the subdiv because ZBR will not unwrap a high poly model, whereas Blender will.
I would never normally ask anyone to help me spread the word, or help me share a post, but in this instance I sort of am asking for some help!
My facebook post can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/Hex3DAustralia/posts/1983909585222348
If you get the time I would really appreciate you sharing this post, I am not the sort of person that spams up all the facebook groups as I think we get enough of that already, so I have made my post there but would really appreciate some help getting it shared as it is reasonably important in the long term to the business I am trying to build.
Thanks for reading, I will be updating pretty often to show you how it works and what we can actually do with it!
It's not just about color.. think textures, patterns, all sorts of great things we can experiment with.
Comments
Drew Pickard
Have you heard anything price wise for the machine? Its funny they are using inkjet technology, it makes sense. I used to use the Sharpe trick a lot before I got my large inventory of colors now.
Geoffro / Hex3D
Honestly, I am not just enthusiastic because they are sending me one.. :) I to this date have ever only been sent one printer for review. The other 15 printers I have I paid for and built over the course of 7 years so for me, getting it as a trial unit just means my wife won't get angry I spent more money on printers... I really think this will be freaking awesome. I got the word some time ago and have been making color models for their launch website, and really it's a whole different way of modelling depending on what program you are using.
Tony
Cool! I briefly saw the image from the image in passing, someone must have shared the da Vinci FB page link. Saw it thought to myself, huh ( interesting), and moved on not thinking much of it. With all the hype sometimes put on printers/technology I tend to take it all with a grain of salt. But seeing your enthusiasm, I am excited to see updates as you work with the machine and see what it can do.
