The first thing I wanted to make with a shiny new product was creative ender 3 pro It was a lithophan. A 3D printed black and white photo that comes to life in bright light. After all, lithophane is difficult to print in a bed-slinger, takes all day to make, and is rather boring to look at without constant backlighting.
Color lithophanes are even harder. From taping a translucent color photo behind plastic (lame) to a four-color process of blending cyan, yellow, magenta, and black using an AMS system, painstakingly done on printers such as: You can also reproduce it. Bamboo Lab P1P.
The 21st century has finally caught up with the sober lithophan. HueForge is a revolutionary app that enables 3D printing. There is no better term than solid lithophane. This program was developed by Steve Lavedas. Available now from Horn & Rhode Art for $12 per year.
HueForge can print overlaid colors instead of shaded bas-reliefs. These prints can achieve interesting 3D illusions despite being only a few millimeters thick. The community surrounding HueForge calls the system “filament painting”. This technique builds up ultra-thin, translucent layers that combine new colors like paint. For example, the hummingbird below does not use green filaments, but a mixture of yellow, blue, black, and white.
HueForge isn’t a design program or a slicer, it’s something in between. Enter an image file and a palette of filament colors. It then helps you calculate where to introduce a color swap based on the transparency of the filament you are using in your print. Once done, export the stl file and process it with your favorite slicer.
Polymaker Supports HueForge
Polymaker saw a unique opportunity to support HueForge and immediately set up a discussion area on Discord, asking photographer James Simpson to test dozens of colors. The company is also offering filament his coupons to early adopters of this software. It is a matter of course. With most of Polymaker’s materials built into his HueForge, people are more likely to buy new spools than bother to test their filament.
That is correct. Before using filament in the HueForge system, you should perform some tests to determine its transparency level. Thanks to Lavedas and Simpson, quite a few filaments are already in the system.
HueForge is also open to other filament manufacturers who wish to provide color library files.
It’s not that hard to test, just a quick printout. See here for directions.
You don’t have to be an artist to get good results with HueForge, but you do need patience and a comprehensive palette of filaments. Many of the program’s early adopters used Midjourney to create interesting art, but any image saved as a png or jpg can be used.
We recommend starting with one of the ready-made HueForge files. Featured on Printables.com Get a feel for the system and tune your printer. Nothing special is required. I just need the ability to pause to switch colors. A 0.2mm nozzle is handy, but on the Bambu X1 Carbon he ran a 0.4mm nozzle and used AMS to automatically swap layers with perfect results.
How to use HueForge
Navigating HueForge’s interface can be complicated, but there are some helpful tutorials on YouTube. Start with the tutorial. interface first, go to HueForge filament paint.
What you need to use HueForge
- Copy of HueForge
- different colored filaments
- Image file
- Canva (optional)
How to 3D print colored lithophane using HueForge
1. Please select an image. Start with an image – This tutorial uses a social media headshot.
2. remove background and run the image in black and white Filter for best results. Free programs like Canva let you do both.
3. save the file as png and Drop it into HueForge’s Program folder..
Four. open image at HueForge.
HueForge defaults to a black and white PETG profile. The filament library lists all available colors and can be added later. Test “transmission distance”.
Five. Please select a color I want to use
6. drag color Fill in the color sliders.
I don’t have many Polymaker basic colors, so I just happened to use them. Inland People’s Liberation Army in black and white, which is expected to be close enough to Polymaker in terms of transparency. I ran a quick test on a roll of Prusament Viva la Bronze and it resembled the gold already in the system. I renamed it Prusament and dropped it on the slider I previously set to gray.
7. Tweak sliders until you are satisfied with the results.
8. Select the “Model Geometry” window. and resize – Used 75 x75mm for faster printing.
9. Click “Save Project As” and Please name it. HueForge automatically creates an STL file for her.
Ten. Open Slicer. I used Bambu Slicer and used AMS to do this via P1P. It can run on almost any printer, but requires manual filament changes. With P1P, you set it and forget it for hours.
11. Set the layer height to 0.08mm. and the 1st layer～.16mm.
12. Set the infill to 100%.
13. Follow the instructions to set the color swap Provided by HueForge,[Filament Layer]of the window[Describe]Click the button to find it.
In Bambu Slicer, right click on the layer slider on the left side of the screen and set the color swap in the preview window. For this image, I had to change two filaments on layers 7 and 13.
The initial results were a little heavy on the whites, but when I reprinted the photo using a more translucent white, I got a much better print. HueForge requires a bit of experimentation, so it’s a good idea to make a smaller, faster sample print before tackling larger prints.
HueForge is currently only available for Windows 10/11, but Mac and Linux versions are also in development.
*Special thanks to Zombie Hedgehog and Dstrbdmedic167 for printing and sharing their models in Polymaker during the 2023 Midwest RepRap festival.
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