Full Color Print

[rocketman051894]

Hello,

I am planning on building a powder printer similar to the plan B. I am interested in using a CYM and Black printer cartage to support full color printing. I am curious to know what you guys think would be the best way to take a .ply (polygon file or similar file type that supports color) and slice it in a way the printer can understand and still retain the color. I know that .stl files can not hold color information so scli3r is out. I was thinking of a program that will slice it and save each layer as a .png file and fill the center and edges with the appropriate color much like how a regular 2D printer would. Is there any such program out there that can manage this? Or is there a better way to achieve this? If anyone owns a full color printer that can handle this kind of stuff, how does your printer achieves it?

Thank you!

[dragonator]

I do not know of any software that converts a colored 3D polygon file to anything that is usable. Obviously Zcorp has this slicer, but it slices to something only for Zcorps. This is one of the remaining hurdles for the full color powder printer I still at some point want to make, but I am not yet anywhere near that stage.

[rocketman051894]

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like I will be writing my own slicer from scratch then. Perhaps i will try to decode the Zcorp slicer and see if I can emulate their printer. I will let you know of my progress when I find a solution so you will be able to use it yourself.

[ezrec]

I have a python based slicer...

https://github.com/ezrec/BrundleFab-software

It converts STL into my BrundleFab GCode format, but it translates into an intermediate SVG format, using slic3r to do the brunt of the work.