Someone wants me to print a box in pink marble, like pink and light pink or off white ripples you might see in a marbled material. She was ok with a white marble, but the white marble filament is just 1 color - off white. I haven’t found any filaments that print in blended colors yet, just multihead extruders printing one of each color at a time.
No, and a marble effect would not even be achievable. They way the printer prints by leaving a layer at a time if the filament had different colors it would look like color changing bands. Theres no way to get the look of a marble slab
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Well, if you variate thin strips of different colors like a repeating bar code randomization, it would look like color changing short hashes, and where they overlapped, there would be thicker streaks of color. The shorter the bands, the less streaked and more speckled it would appear. But you are right, all the different infill patterns, and geometries used, and lengths, the color variations would have to be programmed to coincide with the deposition layers, and almost certainly would be skewed and experience drift. I think it could be done with Vase prints though, but anything with infill would require a different printing set up and considerably more processing power, so that each 0.2x0.4mm deposit had it’s own color value.
Alternatively, there could be thermal properties within the filament that change when the peak temperature is higher, or lower, then the temperature could be programmed to “burn” those colors into view every time they got to the same coordinates, but again, it would be assigning millions of color values. This marshmallow roasting technique is probably easier to control than the filament itself, but is still inferior to simply using two extruders and a color map. I don’t know. I’m out of ideas.
Perry_1
4
i kind of like this idea. Some kind of plastic with a thermo color changing technique!!
3DMuse
5
I’d have to agree with @keebie81 on this one. The marble effect you see on some plastic parts are not done using an extrusion screw but a ram injector. It’s like a heated syringe that pushes pellets of different colours into a mould. An extrusion screw would mix those colours together. Currently, all filaments are made using extrusion screws so I have not seen any that have a marbled effect.
Coming back to keebie’s point, even if you have a filament of marbled texture, depositing it layer by layer would make the end object look like a mess as the colours from the previous layer do not match up with the next.
This effect might be possible using a dual extruder system where you mix for example, white and black filaments. However, the marble texture and shape has to be drawn in CAD and cannot happen stochastically like the ram injection method.
Cheers,
James
well it stands to reason the heat from a contact deposition layer might gradient into the nearest layers, which would cause the mottling to be more smooth, rather than thousands of tiny jagged teeth. Still requires a color map though. Thankfully, that is just 2 extra bytes of information, since 256 celsius changes is plenty. even converting it into a decimal might save space, so that you have your base temperature +/-12.8 degrees, in units of 0.1 degrees. Those subtleties could yield shades, or in the case of true chromatic altering chemicals, a partial rainbow. The key changes to the process would be slowing down the printing process to allot enough time for the small temperature changes, and changing the frequency that the temperature sensor sends back information. Such an extruder and hot end would probably have to be more capable of rapid temperature shifts. It is quite easy to heat up something rapidly, but cooling down things rapidly? You would need a TEC/Peltier Device.
