Colour Printing for the masses!

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.