Colorful 3D Prints on a Single Extruder Printer // Artistic Phone Cases

[Music] cool hey there welcome to make anything my name is Devin and first of all I just want to wish you all a Happy Holidays as you know I'm so thankful for everyone who Tunes in week after week to watch my adventures in 3d printing and design allowing me to do all kinds of crazy experiments and it's just really fun for me and I'm glad you guys enjoy watching it as well on top of being very thankful for everything the holiday season is also a time for a lot of spending you're buying gifts for others and often times you're buying gifts for yourself as well because of all the big sales that are happening I expect a lot of people will be buying their first 3d printers and that's awesome and since someone always asks if you want to know what I would recommend go ahead and visit make anything dot design slash favorites I've got my favorite 3d printers and 3d pens all listed out with the pros and cons I've also got any deals and discounts that I can offer up there on that site as well so check that out it's a really crowded market out there there's a lot of companies selling a lot of printers and they're all trying to get your attention so they're always trying to one-up each other you know and I've noticed the newest thing is a lot of dual color printers coming out from every company they're nothing new but I've just noticed a big flood of dual color printers and I've been testing a lot of them and at this point I've got to say there's none that I would really recommend to a beginner from my experience dual color printers just add complexity they make printers less reliable but just a little bit more hassle than they're currently worth but don't worry because there's still ways they're really cool colorful prints using a single extruder printer and I'm gonna show you one especially cool trick today we're gonna be making some full-color phone cases like this one right here this is my rendition of Van Gogh starry night and as you can see it is very colorful and no I didn't paint this I didn't use a 3d pen this came off of my 3d printer in full color we've got ten colors going on in this print and that's super awesome and I did this on a regular old one nozzle one extruder regular off-the-line 3d printer so today I'm gonna show you how I did that it's really cool so let's get right to it first let's take a quick look at the phone we're making a case for I'm a huge fan of oneplus phones so I convinced gearbest to send me this one plus 6 to make this video I've been using the 1 plus 5 for a year or so and it's been my favorite smartphone that I've ever used so I'm very excited for this upgrade just looking at how nicely this is packaged already says a lot about the attention to detail that oneplus spends on its phones and hey look this one even comes with a phone case but we won't need that for long since we're making our own today here you can see the oneplus 5 next to the 1 plus 6 and they're really about the same size although the screen is larger on this new phone and it's also got a dual camera on the back which is really cool I was hoping to 3d scan the phone to make it easier to design the case but as it turns out there's a black shiny finish of the phone is pretty much the worst thing for 3d scanners so I was not able to get a scan of it so instead I ended up modeling the entire phone from scratch in fusion 360 just by taking measurements with my calipers and then I built the phone case around that I'm not gonna show you the whole design process because I've already done a video about the oneplus 5 phone case which wasn't all that different the one thing here that's gonna stand out is this back panel if I do a cross-section here and zoom in you can see that this is actually a separate body that's basically inlaid into the back of the case here and this is gonna be our canvas for our full color print this part is only 0.2 millimeters thick and that'll be key when it comes to printing all these colors onto this one part first we need to make our design keeping with the theme of famous pieces of art I'm gonna be tracing this piece by Keith Haring so in Illustrator I'm gonna be using this pen tool and basically tracing out the whole design now I'm using illustrator because it works really well for this purpose it's very easy to use but if you're on a budget you can try using Inkscape is very similar or you could even technically do this in fusion 360 although working with splines in 360 definitely isn't as friendly as doing it here in Illustrator as you can see I'm using a template of the back of the phone here that way I can kind of figure out how I want this piece to be arranged on the phone so yeah like I said I basically just traced all of this with the pen tool and then once I'm done I'll go ahead and select everything I'll actually change the stroke width to one point two millimeters to make it a multiple of the point four millimeter nozzle will be printing with and then I'm gonna go up here into this drop-down menu and select expand to turn all of these lines into fills which basically outlines everything that we have here then I went in to take a closer look and just to clean up some little things that I wanted to make more smooth or easier to print I rounded some edges I know I rushed through this part but that's because there's already so many tutorials on using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator it's its own video but basically we just want a vector artwork that we can export as a DXF file so we'll go here to export export as select DXF and then in the export options we'll change the scale to one inch equals one unit and hit OK now let's jump back into fusion 360 where we can select this back surface and use the insert DXF command we'll select the file that we just created and then we'll drag it to more or less align with the position of the phone we'll hit OK and then I'll go right back in select edit sketch and then we'll select everything and use the Move command to readjust it so that it's exactly aligned the way that we want it once we've got everything in position now we're going to go ahead and select the extrude tool and I'm gonna start selecting all of the outlines of these various figures although you'll notice here when I try to select this outline it's not behaving the way that it's supposed to and that'll happen from time to time when you're bringing in DXF files from ill straighter or from wherever I haven't figured out how to completely avoid it but for now my workaround is to just kind of start diagnosing the problem within the sketch here so one thing I'll do is just draw lines that cut through the entire part that way I can start to pinpoint where the problem is see just drawing this line and I can already select more than I could before so let's go ahead and do that extrude again and like I said we'll select just the figures basically all of the profiles that we want to be a certain color well drag this arrow to extrude through the entire phone case and then we're gonna switch the operation to intersect and we'll change the objects to cut so that it only cuts through that thin body that I mentioned earlier our so called canvass all right there you go now you can see those outlines and here in the bodies menu we suddenly have a ton of bodies so we'll create a new group and then we can select all of these new bodies and bring those into the group a so now this group basically represents all of the parts that are going to be this one color before doing that intersect I did make a copy of that design canvas piece and I'll do that again right now just control-c control-v to copy and paste it in place that way I always have a spare canvas for the next color before we move on though let's go back into this sketch and figure out the one part that it wouldn't let me select I noticed that the glitch was kind of leading to this line right here so I just selected it and deleted it and I guess it was a duplicate line or something but once I deleted that everything was behaving as it should so now I can go back and edit that intersect command to include the entire outline of that figure there we go we can also right-click and open up this appearance panel to change the material here to match the color that will be printing in so I'll make all of these outlines bright red and that'll help us get a better idea of what we're actually making all right so there's our group of red pieces I can just go ahead and turn off that whole group for now while we're in here why don't we duplicate this material and apply a new color to this canvas once again for our next group of colors so we'll be doing this lovely kind of turquoise blue and then I'll turn back on that sketch that we imported and do another extrude function but this time instead of selecting the outlines of the figures I'm gonna be selecting all of these swoosh marks for lack of a better term once again I'll drag that through the model and do an intersect with the design canvas and then we'll go ahead and hit OK all right there we go now we've got all these little swoosh bodies so here I'll make another group we'll just call this one B and then once again take all of these new parts and put them into that B group for all the parts that will be blue so hopefully you get the idea by now we're basically separating this canvas piece into all these different bodies based on the colors that we want them to be and we're creating an individual group for each color so at this point we have four groups for each of these four colors and then we also have the design for the phone case which can be a fifth color will be printing each of these colors and combining them to create this final colorful case but before we do that we want to create a file for each group of colors to do that we're going to want to expand all of these groups here and then select all of the files and hit V to make them invisible all of them except for the one color that we want to export so here we have everything hidden except for Group A and then we can go up here to the top drop-down menu right click and select save as STL and it'll only create an STL for the visible parts in this case all the bodies that we want to be red we'll save that as a single STL and then repeat the process to save out each individual color all right so now we've got our parts and we just need to figure out how to send this to the printer in a way that it can combine into a single part I'm gonna be slicing this and simplify 3d and the first thing I'll do is align the selected model origins that way everything lines up into place and creates this single phone case now I'll go ahead and open up the process for our printer and down here where it says select models we want to make sure that only one of the STL's is selected I made a special profile for this technique because there are some slight changes that we want to make to get the best results for one thing I'll set the retraction vertical lift or z hop to 0.8 millimeters that way the nozzle doesn't run into the previous colors that we've printed I'll set the layer height to 0.1 millimeter that way each color will be printed in two layers I'll also make sure that I'm not using a skirt or brim because that might interfere with the other colors we're printing for in film nothing too special but we do want 100% infill so we get solid colors everything else here is more or less the same but I'm gonna slow down the speed all the way to 30 millimeters per second because we want to print nice and slowly here the priority is getting a very clean first layer because that's going to determine how clean our graphics look finally in the Advanced Settings here I'm gonna make sure that we have this selected to avoid crossing the outline for travel movements which will create less stringing and just create a cleaner graphic once again alright so we'll hit OK and then when we preview this print you'll notice it'll only print that one color and only two layers tall so we'll export that to our SD card and then we'll go back into this profile and then only select this second color we'll prepare that once again and now you can see we have a completely different print of the second color once again we would export that to the SD card as a separate file then we'll go through once again select the third one export that and so on and so forth until we have a separate g-code file for color finally for the last file will print the phone case itself and for this one you don't really need to use any special profile you can basically just print it as a standard print although we do want that same point 1 millimeter layer height great so now we have our five separate g-code files for five separate colors loaded onto the SD card and plugged into the printer so let's go ahead and start with the first color this mint green PLA from filamentous I'll go ahead and purge that through until we're getting a clean single color and then I'll go through the print menu and select that first g-code file all right off we go on the any cubic I three mega and you can see here it's printing just that one color I decided to go with the I three mega for this print because the ultra base platform is really reliable at holding down the print and I also like the kind of dimpled texture that it leaves on the bottom of the print as you can see this first color printed out quite nicely and now before the bed or the nozzle cool down we're just going to swap out the filaments for the next color and start that next print based on the second g-code file because these prints don't overlap and since they're only 0.2 millimeters tall our printer is able to execute each one without running into the previous print the result is that we're able to combine all of these different colors on these first two layers to create this very colourful outcome and while this does take a little bit of extra work in the design phase the printing step is actually rather easy it's just a matter of swapping out colors between each file and printing them on top of each other once we've printed all the different colors for our graphic we can print the final file the phone case itself and if we've done everything correctly it'll just print on top of our graphic and finish off without any problems I chose white for the last color here since some of these filaments are somewhat transparent so by creating this white background it's going to make sure that we get really vibrant bright colors once we flip this over although for this particular case I did swap out the filament one more time partway through this last print to some yellow pro PLA from madder hackers so that this case really pops alright the print is done so we can finally flip it over and reveal our design and Wow does that look amazing the colors are just so bright and just so clean this is super cool this is immediately one of my favorite techniques as you saw at the beginning of the video I took it up another notch and did this starry night by Van Gogh and this one has ten colors going on and I printed it with a smaller 0.2 millimeter nozzle on my CR 10 there's a little bit of smooshing of the layers here but I really can't complain I just think this is the coolest thing ever to finish things off with the perfect trifecta I made a third case based on a work by Kandinsky I did get a bit of smudging with the really detailed parts here but overall it's still very clean and I'm super happy with how it looks now since these cases were printed in PLA which isn't necessarily the most resilient material I wanted to try some different treatments to see if I could make this phone case more durable so the first technique I wanted to try was using this XTC 3d printing epoxy this stuff is super easy to work with it's a two-part epoxy so you just mix them together with a two-to-one ratio by volume and then I can go ahead and just pour it on top of my part I went ahead and spread this stuff over the entire top of the case and then I decided to sacrifice a brush to go ahead and smooth it out a bit more and get it all around the edges as well I laid down a pretty thick coat here so within the ten minutes of working time that we have with this resin I did my best to eliminate any big drips around the edge here while that was curing I also wanted to try out this fast-drying polyurethane spray that people have suggested for smoothing out PLA parts so I went ahead and applied that to my Kandinsky case with three medium to light coats spread apart 15 minutes all right let's take a look at this epoxy coated case after about four hours the epoxy is completely cured and as you can see by the reflection here it didn't create a completely flat finish but it is still very smooth and definitely feels really nice as well I had no problem snapping the phone into place the thick high-gloss finish looks and feels really good and I feel like I could drop this case a few times without causing any damage next we've got the Kandinsky case which also turned out really nicely although the polyurethane coat is much thinner than the epoxy you can barely tell it's there although it did kind of dull the shine that we have on this surface so now it's got this nice satin look to it lastly we have the Keith Haring phone case that we designed together today and while we didn't do any special finish for this one I still think it's my favorite just because I really love the colors and how crisp it came out it's a really cool phone case Wow I'm a big fan of color guys so this is a game changer for me this is really exciting I'm really excited to keep pushing it and see what I can do with this technique because I know there's that big limitation right where you're basically only getting the full color on the first one or two layers but that doesn't mean you can't get crazy with it you can always get crazy with it so if you have any ideas of other techniques that we can combine with this or just really cool things that can be printed using this technique please share a comment below I I love hearing from you guys and yeah I feel like there's so much potential here it's such a cool thing anyways that's it for today thank you guys so much for watching thanks to gearbest for sending me this awesome phone I'll put a link in the description if you want to grab one for yourself as well as to the other gear best Black Friday deals including lots of great deals on 3d printers and all kinds of Technology I'll put links to my mini factory where you can download all these phone cases print one for your own phone and you know unlimited custom phone cases for life it doesn't get much better than that so that's it for this video until next time I'm Devon this is make anything have a happy holiday and don't forget to stay inspired you

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 342,457

Rating: 4.9364142 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, phone case, 3D printed phone case, color 3D printing, multicolor, dual extruder, dual color, how to, tutorial, fusion 360, illustrator, design, full color 3D printing, cool 3D prints, multiple pass, multicolor 3D printing, multicolor 3D printer, dual color 3D printer, multipass, colorful 3D prints, MMU, palette 2, mosaic, palette, MMU 2.0, DIY

Id: KV2AjyowXX4

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/LALLANAAAAAA]

Sometimes I feel creative and skilled at my hobby and then I watch something from Make Anything to bring myself brutally back down to earth.

[u/TedTheTrolI]

That was cool. Thank for sharing. You doing multiple colors on anything now?

[u/Bmarquez1997]

These are so cool! I've been wanting to make a phone case for a while, but I haven't been able to work on it because of school and work

[u/galorin]

Awesome idea, might have to have a play with it myself, see if I can convince Cura to do the same.

Gearbest is really not a company we should be supporting. Pity that they are your their sponsor.