Many of you have probably seen the new Snapmaker U1 printers at MakeICT, but they’ve got some hidden abilities that people may not be aware of…
Besides being able to do four color printing, there is a fork of the Snapmaker Orca slicer called Snapmaker Orca Full Spectrum, which allows you to combine those four colors into various layer configurations to simulate many more than four colors. The sample in this photograph I have attached has used White, Yellow, Red, and Blue to create a palette of 38 simulated colors.
I actually purchased one of these machines for my home, but it is identical to the ones over in the FabLab and those machines can do this exact same thing, as this is doing. I’m doing this on a brand new, straight out of the box machine with no modifications.
I am also putting a link to my full Facebook post, showing videos as well. MakeICT’s forum is way too limiting on upload size to contain the videos I’ve included in this Facebook version. It’s a public post, so anyone can view.
I’ll be more than happy to answer anyone’s questions about how to do this on the new machines, and could potentially show people in person how to do this, time permitting.
It’s as cool as advertised. I did the rainbow chicken from this guy’s video and full sent it with approximate guesses at what my filaments are color-wise. Seven “colors” and 19 hours later (I printed 3, one is outside the FabLab), it definitely biases towards the darker filament so future prints I’ll probably try to make it more like 70/30 light-dark instead of 50/50 on the mix.
Not sure if you’ve done any Hueforge image creation, but it turns out that my going through all of my filaments and finding the transmission distance of each one (written on each color sample benchy in my collection) has actually proven to be a rather useful piece of information for doing these. There’s an upcoming separate piece of software that is going to make doing the painting, and blending of colors in actual gradients, a piece of cake…
I did the chicken too, but you obviously picked much better filaments to do yours with! It looks way better than mine turned out! I’ve already ordered my second U1 machine for home. and going to sell my Bambu Lab A1 Combo with 2 AMS units.
