HueForge getting started guide: Filament painting with your 3D printer

if you want to make something beautiful and unique on your 3D printer almost any 3D printer in fact then hueforge is for you and today I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to get started [Music] [Music] Hugh Forge has been out since June and honestly I've been a bit out of the loop I didn't even know it existed until my patreon Quarry requested a video on it in my opinion this is something new and truly valuable for 3D printing and once you know the basics it's not hard at all to get great results we're going to start by answering what is Hue Forge qforge at its core can take a 2D image like this and convert it into a multi-color 3D printed image this example was done on the 3D printer without multi-material capability and you might notice that there's black white a pale purple color and then a fourth color which up close we can see is orange but when held from a distance blends with the others to look more like a golden brown you'll also notice some gradients like on the edge of the helmet and in other places with these four colors are being successfully mixed together and that's because 3D printer filament will allow a certain amount of light through it's pretty obvious with white and also with another light color like yellow that you would expect it to be part really translucent but something black and opaque like this piece of 3D printed velcro still allows a certain amount of light through if it is thin enough let's use this unrelated model as an example of how Hue Forge works this voxelized model has a different color for each side the top surfaces were meant to be white but as you can see the white was too thin and the colors underneath can be seen through what Hue Forge is really good at is taking advantage of this by stacking colors on top of each other controlling their thickness and creating new color Blends if we preview that earlier print using the base colors without any blending it would look like this but hueforge can calculate the amount of blending for each filament allowing color gradients and smooth blending to get a final printed result that appears very sophisticated especially considering it's just full colors stacked on top of each other it's important to state that multiple filaments are never melted and mixed in the nozzle but always stacked on top of each other with the light from the filaments underneath transmitting through depending on the thickness of the top colors to achieve this we import a 2d graphic Hue Forge will then convert it to black and white paying attention to the light and dark areas which will be used to create a 3D STL with the dark regions being low and the lighter regions being high we then tell hueforge what colors we'd like to use experiment with how thick each filament is in the stack and each time we make a change Hue Forge is calculating how the colors will blend with our given filament so we can be confident that what we see in the preview window is what will be 3D printed when we're done Hue Forge will export the 3D STL as well as a text file telling us the colors as well as when we need to change the filaments throughout the print and we'll then automate the printer pausing and waiting for the new filaments at these Heights the print will then continue with the new color printing on top of the old one and when the print is done all of that combines to give us this beautiful imagery so unique and Powerful software that can work with any 3D printer and it only cost 18 us for a hobby lifetime license I say any 3D printer but there are some small prerequisites first and most importantly your 3D printer needs to be pause to change filament if you've got a filament run out sensor of any kind there's a 99 chance this is already set up as this type of subroutine will be called to plug the nozzle and prompt the user to change the filament even without a run out sensor you can easily enable this in Marlin firmware firstly by uncommenting nozzle Park feature and then uncommenting Advanced pause feature which will enable the m600g code you can test that it's working by sending m600 over octoprint or another terminal and if you get anything but an error it means that it's set up for Clipper if we come to the GitHub and come to sample macros there's a sample m600 macro that you can copy and paste and when you paste this into your printed configuration file your printer will be ready to go alternatively if your 3D printer is multi-color capable with an example of this being a bamboo lab printer with an AMS then you're also good to go our second requirement is that we have access to change slicer parameters nothing fancy just basic slicer setting our third requirement is we have access to filaments with known characteristics and Hue Forge already has a very large library with many filaments to choose from alternatively as you'd hope it's very easy to add your own filaments to the library and it only takes five minutes to do an easy calibration print to finish as a bonus the better tuned your 3D printer is the better your results will be things like flow rate pressure advance and retraction will help your 3D printer get those details more accurate as you'll see later Hue Forge is pretty easy to use once you know what you're doing but it can be tricky to learn because there's no written documentation instead there's a series of YouTube videos and streams my aim for this video is to synthesize the most important bits you need to know to hit the ground running and we're going to start with the demo print that you don't even need to purchase hughforge to use just to make sure that everything is working Steve the creator reviewforge has a profile on printables that I've linked below and on it we have a range of pre-made sdls that have been through hueforge this means you can try before you buy and we're going to use this man in a spacesuit graphic card in part because it's said to be a very forgiving model we need four colors and that's going to be black a darker color a lighter color and then white so let's switch to the files tab and pick the one designated for a 0.4 millimeter nozzle we'll now drag and drop this STL into our slicer and we can see that it is three-dimensional back on printables we have the settings that we need to input into our slicer and they're pretty simple our first layer height is going to be 0.16 our overall layer height 0.08 all about infield is going to be a solid pattern like rectilinear and we only want one wall Loop very importantly our sparse infill density needs to be 100 with a rectilinear infill pattern too I would recommend once you've made these changes to save a preset with Hue Forge in the name so you can switch back and forth between your normal Printing and what you need for this whenever you like with the required changes made we can now start slicing the sdls that Hue Forge creates are quite detailed and they can take a little while to slice but once this is done we'll note that the boiler that was around the outside has disappeared because it was Zero thickness we'll now switch back to printables for our instructions on colors we start with black and then the first change is at layer 8 at 0.72 millimeters we'll now insert our m600 Command so the color changes at that layer in Orca slicer or prusa slicer we drag the vertical bar down until the layer and layer height matches we'll then right click on the plus and select add custom G-Code and in this box we're going to type m600 and click OK each time we do this we'll need to click slice once more but it won't take anywhere near as long as the first time we come back to printables and see the next swap is at layer 13. so we move the vertical slider to this layer right click and once again add m600 as our custom G-Code there are other ways to do it but I found this was the simplest back to printables for the final swap which is at layer 17. so we'll go to layer 17 and once more at m600 as our custom G-Code and after clicking slice for the final time that is our model complete and ready to Center the printer if you're using Cura you need to come up to extensions post-processing and modify G-Code then we add a script and select filament change we can tick use firmware configuration and then enter the layer number we can ignore everything else and we'll repeat this adding scripts for each layer number where we need an m600 filament change to finish we slice once more with our three G-Code changes automatically inserted into the output ultimately whatever slicer we're using we can open the G-Code in a text editor and search for the layer that we need and then manually add in m600 to make the poles occur add this for each swap save the G-Code and you're ready to print if you haven't already pick your colors I went for black glittery silver gray and then white to finish with black loaded up we now start the print and once the right layer has been reached the printer should pause and park the head ready for you to change over to the new filament pode to the nozzle until the color change is complete and then hit resume for printing to continue here we see my second color metallic silver printing over the black everything continues on its own until we reach the next m600 where we once again manually change the color and after a couple of hours and three color changes you should be left with something like this if you're cynical maybe you're thinking you could just print this out on paper but there's something about the hard plastic that makes this solid and tactile and of course the visual appearance is amazing too let's assume you also got a great result and now want to purchase the software the link to the shop is in the description and we can scroll down and select one of the options I'm sure most of you will only be using this for personal use and the good news is a lifetime license is only 18 before proceeding make sure that your computer is compatible with the software and also double check the terms of the license to make sure you've got the right one you can add the software to the cart check out and then receive an email with a download link this will be a zip and inside are the files that you need to run the software there's no installation file you just need to drag these to a folder of your choice we'll notice an executable for starting the software but also familiarize yourself with some of the other folders here for example the projects which has a bunch of samples to get started with and also the tools that we'll be using later when you first open the software you might be overwhelmed by how many parts there are to the interface but some of these items are Advanced and I didn't need to touch them once just remember that the specific video guides on the Hue forge YouTube channel that explain these settings in more detail let's quickly drag in an image to make it easier to explain firstly our lighting settings I never played with these an important area is the general options we have our layer height the default being 0.08 our base layer height the default being 0.16 and our detail size which is typically set to half the width of the nozzle so 0.2 for a 0.4 millimeter nozzle then we have width and height which controls the size of the final STL if you need to shrink or enlarge an image to suit your printer here's where you do it on the left we have our filament library and there really is a lot of filaments already inbuilt and calibrated which is this number in the right hand column in the lower right we have model geometry and you probably won't need to touch these settings ISO certainly didn't for any of the examples you see in this video finally in the lower left we have our most important section which is called color sliders and anything not set to zero is a color that will be used in our print we can see here that we start with black and it prints to layer 7 then gray will print until layer 12 a lighter gray until layer 18 and then white through to the end layer 24. to introduce different colors we simply drag them down to one of the sliders and our preview will update instantly for the most part using qforge simply means importing an image setting the size dragging down the filaments you want to use and then playing with the sliders until you get the appearance that you're after and once you're happy you come up to file and save your project this will not only save the project file but also a copy of the original image the STL ready to go into the slicer and a text file called describe with our instructions for the colors to load as well as when to swap between them and back in Hue Forge we can get the same information by clicking on the describe button we'll now work our way through some example projects starting by adding and calibrating our own filaments the first thing you should do is scroll down and look for Brands and colors that you already own for instance on hand at the moment I have bamboo Jade white burn view lab green and orange any of these that you tick will be moved to the top for easy access later on let's say we want to add our own filament for that we're going to click a new filament and start by clicking a color that's close to your filament you can always adjust the sliders to get it darker or lighter as needed and for the most accuracy possible get some footage of your filament in the light you'll be viewing from and then use an image editor to sample the color and get the RGB values you can then enter these directly into Hue Forge whatever method you choose click OK once you're ready to proceed now you have a chance to enter some details for instance this is x3d blue the final value is TD or transmission distance and that's what we need to calibrate this is a measure of how opaque or transparent the filament is a low TD meaning opaque and a high TD meaning that light can travel through easily you can guess if you like but we're about to find the exact value with a calibration print so just click add for now remember that tools folder inside the Hue Forge directories we're now going to go to it and load the sdl called step test Square we only need two filament colors for this test so put any other ones down to zero to disable them the first color should be black and you need to adjust it to a height of 1.04 for the second color the slider should go all the way to the top and then we come to our material library and drag down the filament that we want to calibrate in terms of hue Forge that's all we need to do for now and we can switch to our slicer we're going to import that same sdl make sure we have our Hue Forge slicer profile active slice and set up a layer change at height 1.04 just like we did earlier adding the m600 command we start the print with black filament and then switch to our Target color when prompted when it's done we visually inspect our sample come back into Hue Forge and then manually change the transmission distance from down the bottom until the preview in Hue Forge matches what we see in real life compare the two as many times as you need to to be confident for this x3d blue pla I ended up with a transmission distance of 4 and when we're happy we click save we'll then be prompted with a summary of any changes we've made and we click save once more at this stage I noticed a bug where the library version hadn't been updated but simply restarting the software fixed that you can run that same GCO file from your printer as many times as you need to to calibrate all of your filaments meaning it wasn't very long until I built up my own library of filaments on hand so now we can move on to a project from scratch and I found this open source picture of Center on Wikimedia Commons and the only preparation I did was selecting and cutting out the background in Photoshop before saving it as a PNG processing this in Hue Forge after everything we've learned is actually quite easy I dragged in the image set a width of 200 millimeters and then decided I would only use three colors black red and white to match the McLaren Livery of the era and all I did was play with the sliders until visually I was happy with the appearance making sure the face wasn't too red but also too white I then saved the project and headed to the slicer we've already covered using hueforge on a printer with manual filament changes but what about a printer with multi-color capabilities in your slicer select your multi-color printer and make sure you have all of your available filaments loaded as well as the Hue Forge profile and then after the initial slice use hueforge to tell you what layers you'll be swapping at drag the vertical slider to the Target layer and right click and instead of adding custom G-Code instead we'll go change filament and select the color filament we're after or click slice once more and this will set up everything to change colors automatically in this case using the bamboo lab AMS a couple of hours later I was left with this and I'm really happy firstly because it looks fantastic and secondly because I calibrated the red myself and it looks just like the preview so I guess that means I did a reasonable job it's quite interesting looking at these close-up as you can see how the different shades of red and pink are created by varying the thickness of each stacked color looking from the right angle we can also see how three-dimensional some of these features are to get the right amount of contrast between light and dark that's one success in the bag so what else can we do my daughter wanted something Star Wars so I picked this open source image of grogu by hiva sobani again I put this through Photoshop and cut out the background saving as a PNG which supports transparency one change I made for this one was lowering the layer height from the default 0.08 to 0.04 if I toggle this back and forth we can see that it improves the blending of color gradients as the thinner layers will give us more precise control of how the light passes through if you want to try this make sure you make the slicer profile match and perhaps save this version as its own profile again I went for three colors a thin layer of black a moderate amount of green and then white to finish to get those highlights on the face and the front of the jacket this one I accidentally made a little bit thin this makes it flex but that doesn't change the appearance the large areas of straight black are a little bit obvious in terms of the individual extrusions so this made me change the top surface pattern from rectilinear to monotonic which is designed to make that less obvious beyond that this is another one I'm happy with and because it's so thin it only took just over an hour to print my son asked for some sort of picture of Pele and I found this open source version on Wikimedia comments again this went into Photoshop to cut out the background and save as a PNG and I kept that finer 0.04 millimeter layer height for this image I actually scaled up to suit the maximum size bed of the bamboo lab X1 rather than go for realism i instead styled this this one in Brazilian colors using blue rather than black as the base layer and then stacking green yellow and white on top this means that the Shadows are blue rather than black less realistic but more thematic the style of this one is different but personally I think it still looks really good with the blue and green and yellow all next to each other and the white highlights the gradients between the colors are quite good although I probably had the white a little bit too prominent this yellow filament was a bit old and stringy and it has detracted slightly from the appearance but most of those strings will be quite easy to remove the most important thing is my son loves it and he can't wait to display it and that's the extent of my testing so far and hopefully you've learned everything you need to get to the same level once you set up I think Hue Forge is amazingly easy to use import your image pick your colors and play with the sliders until you get the appearance you're after but most I tested was four colors but as you can see it can support many more most onerous part is probably setting up the film element changes in the slicer but that only takes a couple of minutes and because even bed-sized prints are so thin they use very little filament with this Center print only using just over 35 grams of filament which includes purging for color changes that makes you forge an ideal and worthwhile way to use up those tiny bits of filament on the end of your spools this video could have been a lot longer I mean I haven't even mentioned hueforge can produce color lithophanes too congratulations to Steve for creating something wonderful and I strongly encourage you to use these videos and streams to learn more thanks to Corey for the request thank you to you for watching the whole way through and until next time happy filament painting g'day it's Michael again if you liked the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time foreign

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 118,727

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d printed, 3d print, hueforge, hue forge, hueforging, huegorged, filament painting, guide, tutorial, how to, step by step, help, single nozzle, orcaslicer, firmware, m600, pause, filament, change, prusaslicer, cura, senna, pele, grogu, star wars, painting, bambu lab, x1c, p1p, p1s, ams, automatic material system

Id: ua3DoRlmN-c

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023