Color 3D Printing At Home

It's possible to buy a color 3D printer, but they're currently very expensive, such as those from ZCorp. Meanwhile, typical home 3D printers are monochrome, at least until you change the input plastic filament. The good news is that the selection of filament colors continues to increase and now includes quite a variety beyond simple base colors - even glow-in-the-dark plastic can be had. 

 

However, how does one change colors in mid-print on an inexpensive 3D printer? One obvious solution is to cut the filament and feed in an alternate color - but this technique is not ideal as you can't accurately predict when the color coming out the nozzle will actually change and frequent color changes are problematic. 

 

Another simple and effective technique recently involved use of a garden-variety marker pen writing on the input filament as seen in the image. While colors can be changed, this approach also suffers from the "when does it come out?" problem. 

 

A RepRap experiment last year attempted to use inkjets, but this was really not for coloring solids, but for laying down special substances in small amounts - like electrical traces or sticky parts, etc. 

 

Makerbot hosts a wiki page that investigates the problem of color 3D printing, and the conclusion is that to do it properly, it's pretty complex. New hardware is clearly required, as well as serious software upgrades. Worse, STL format might have to be changed to account for color information. 

 

Bottom line: Buy some colored markers. 

 

Via Thingiverse, RepRap and MakerBot

Full Color 3D Printing

Yes, that's right - Shapeways now offers full color 3D printing. They've scored a ZCorp 650 3D printer, which provides the color capability. The "Full Color Sandstone" material is able to handle color texture maps. 

 

It's obviously more work to prepare color models. You must create a texture map in your 3D modelling software for your object, and then export it as a VRML97 or X3D file. Zip it and the texture map images and you're then able to upload to Shapeways. But we think it's worth the extra effort. 

 

This is a big change in the 3D print services environment. Now full color printing is available at relatively low cost to practically anyone through Shapeways' popular print service. In fact they say:

 

This is our least expensive material and the pricing is $0.99 per Cubic Centimeter ($16.22 per cubic Inch + $ 1.50 start up costs per model, these prices include worldwide shipping)

 

One can imagine the items being pulled out of their 650 over the next few months. 

 

At the rate Shapeways keeps adding new features, we're figuring that by end of 2010 Shapeways will offer food printing too. In color. 

 

Via Shapeways and Shapeways