Autodesk announced the development of colored resins for use in their Ember 3D printer reference platform.
Ember is a hardware design for a 3D printer made by 3D software giant Autodesk, in hopes of inspiring more growth and interest in 3D applications. The Ember is a very capable platform, able to print highly detailed objects using its resin-based 3D printing process.
Up to now, we’ve seen only clear objects emerge from the Ember, and to obtain differently colored prints you’d have to experiment with other third party resins.
Now Autodesk has announced a complete set of colored resins, including Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black and White.
Why do we think this is important? Because these four colors are the print color standard for producing many colors through mixing.
The Ember 3D printer, like all resin 3D printers, uses a tank of uniform resin as its material. Prints will be whatever that resin’s color happens to be. But it has always been possible to mix resins to get different colors, as we saw in the experiments done by Full Spectrum Laser some time ago.
The difference here is that these resin formulations are the key color components. You could, for example, mix them in precise ratios to obtain consistent and predictable colors, something you cannot do with random resins. Half Cyan and half Yellow, for example, gives you “exactly” green, in theory. Black and White resins are provided because mixes of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow don’t result in those colors.
The color mixing process is not quite complete. In addition to the colors you can obtain by mixing Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, you should also be able to introduce brightnesss and darkness. The new Ember resins don’t seem to do that, but we can imagine they’re working on that, too.
Meanwhile, you can now purchase Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Apparently White will soon be available, but not quite yet.
Via Autodesk
