HueForge: Using grayscale images to map filament layers

[Music] okay so let's start off by talking about how hu Forge works because it's really important to understand exactly the model it is using in order to create these incredibly precise and beautiful 3D prints so what they do is they take a picture say this picture and they're going to create this actual surface that they're going to project this picture down onto right and when they do that you can see that it generates an offset so everywhere it's light up here goes higher and dark here goes lower and so let me turn off this and let's take a look at this a little bit better first off it's important to understand that the amount of detail is a function of the size of these squares of these little polygons that they uses so it's got to create a very dense mesh let me show you what I'm talking about as I make it less dense you can see that the model becomes less precise right so you can see to the point where where it's really just not precise at all and the higher density of course the more precise it becom now that we understand that what we need to understand is that this is the actual model that it's going to use to 3D print the difference this model is it is expanded quite a bit actually their model is probably something like let give a strength of 02 something that's much tinier much thinner so if you look at this from the side view it's just not very it's just not very Bas probably even smaller than that actually the density but so that so it's a very it's not moving up significantly but I want I want to show this in a little more exaggerated view so that we can better understand what we're doing what H Forge does is it takes and it creates colors and it Maps the colors to the different areas on the displacement map so as we look at this let me go ahead and show what I'm talking about let's just take uh this one right here and you it's got some different colors you can see this is pretty much exactly how things work work so at the lowest level in our particular case here we have black so if we want if we want to we can move the brown around and you can see the same Sliders in hu Forge that does this kind of thing and then we can move the green and right now we're having 1 2 3 four five colors so however many colors you choose to print is going to give you the amount of control that you have over all these colors and how they blend together and everything so what he Forge does is it will stop at a certain level and it'll do a fillament change and remember that we have in this case we start off with black then we go we go next to Brown and then we go next to print the green and then we print the red and then we print the wide this particular example isn't taken into account the fact that filaments are actually have a transparency level so that changes things quite a bit in fact if I look at if we zoom in on this we just go let's take the red and as we move the red up and let's just go ahead and I'm going to put this into a linear mode we're going to see as we get to let's move the white up too we see that as we get to the top here especially if we move this like this see the white is actually pink now it's not white anymore it's pink and so by by understanding where you're going to place that red line and the white line you're going to be able to affect the color above and that's really the Magic in hu Forge is it takes into account the transparency of the filament and figures out what that color is going to be above it as it prints okay so that's the basics of how this works now let's talk about some of the issues that we're going to run into so let's go into this no soliciting silence let's go ahead and take a look at that so that's what this is that's what this image is right here let's go ahead and turn this off and now let's take a look at this and also let's just this so we have it actually H Forge actually recognizes a transparency and a ping and will make that cut out for us okay I just opened up this so we can see this image we can see what we're talking about so right now we have a blue star and we have these yellow stars and if we look at this color we can see that because the displacement map is using the Luminous or the grayscale value of this image this is the model that we're going to end up with and as we said that there's a transparency channel that is also honored by he Forge the challenge is that when we start to look at these colors and we're trying to find a very tiny little spot where they're going to be different it becomes really hard for instance let's go ahead and go up here there's the blue if as you see as I move down the blue it hits here first and there the second so let's just do it this way swap these over okay and then let's move down the orange so we have to basically do a very fine tuning of this right so I've got that that's about what we need to do in order to get the orange working on this now the problem comes when we go in here and let's just turn this back into a linear and we can see that we've got a lot of bleeding going on here and in fact the way that's going to end up looking is more and more going to be like like this like where it fades quite a bit and that's a problem and the challenge becomes especially when we actually start to reduce the size of this so put strength to something like point2 which is still quite tiny and then we just need to back up so we go to here and then we go to here and you find that it's almost impossible there's just not enough resolution to get what it is that you want so we can get it to work but it's quite the challenge uh because we have much less dynamic range to work with and that's the same problem with h Forge and keep in mind this is still much much thicker than what we're going to be printing so it becomes even more and more difficult as we go and so the challenge is how do we make this easier to actually apply these colors and so the way we do it is we do it by taking all these colors and spreading them out equally into a grayscale map so we have black and white and then like a 33% a 66% so when we do that we end up having a an even amount of areas that we can Target so let's go back in I'll show you talking about now you can see the the difference in height between this color which is the blue and this color which is the orange is going to be difficult to access with the sliders but if we use that gray scale now we see the differen in Highs are much greater and it then it makes it much easier to access so let's just go and do this and again we'll just there's our white there's our orange and the blue it just it's really doesn't I've got a lot of room for error here and so that's the secret behind using grayscale maps to control where these actual sliders end up with in hu Forge okay so let's talk now about how hu Forge handles all this so here's our sliders here's that image that we started with and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and drag these down have the brown in here we've got uh blue color which was probably here and we have an orange color or a yellow color maybe here so we have our color set up and you can see it's not working correctly yet so we can start to fool around with this a little bit and we can probably get close to what we want something like that probably works although the white isn't very white but you get the idea now I I need to mention that you need to push the smoothing all the way down while you're working in this kind of flat color mode keep that all the way down that's the one setting the rest of the settings we can play with later but for this I think pushing the smoothing all the way down you can tell the difference from here and all the way here just it changes the brightness of the colors and you can see that we've basically been able to get close to what we want now let's take the grayscale version of this and we're going to see that the white now is much wider the yellows yellow and then the blue I can push it up a little bit and the blue is going to be quite a bit Bluer that's showing an example of how this works nicely but there are more difficult examples that we need to pay attention to let's take a look at those let's try another example we know we've got brown green and red here so I'm going just grab the brown a green and the red and a white so I'm going to put all these in this and I'm going move them around and move the sliders around and you'll know there's almost nothing I can do to get the green the green can show up but then it wipes out the white so it's very hard to get this to work at all in fact it's pretty much impossible there there's a way and I'm going to show you in a second how this can be done there's some settings over here we can change but it's much easier if we just set these up like this and just grab the grayscale version of it and Bam it just shows up right so what was I talking about earlier so if we have this and we're still trying to finagle it one thing we can do is we can actually increase the max depth I'm going to change that to three and then I'm going to move this white all the way up at you're going to start to see now the green is doing better now what did we do so what we did is we basically increased the depth this way so we did this we made it larger and when it's larger then we have more room now for each one of these each one of these to display that makes sense gives us a little bit more dynamic range and it's just something to to keep in mind if you're really having trouble hitting a color then you can always expand the dynamic range by adjusting the max depth of course it's going to take longer to print you're going to add a lot more filament to it and this is now 3 mm thick instead of 2 mm thick but that's an interesting point okay so the other thing I mentioned before this it's always a good idea probably to Jack the smoothing all the way down watch the colors over here as the smoothing is increased you can see that everything Blends together a lot more look at the whites you can tell so anyway Jack smoothing all the way down and if you need to adjust the max depth those are the two things I'd pay attention to so next what I want do is talk about how do you get from a color image into a grayscale and I'll show you how you can do that fairly quickly also I want to mention a few other things first off I'm only surmising all the details of how all this works as I don't have any special insight into the H Forge development or special access to developer I suspect there is quite some oversimplification regarding the visualization of the displacement processes and I'd also like to thank Alva on the hu Forge form for his help at solving some of this thanks Alva okay so now what we want to do is we want to go through the workflow that you want to use when you're trying to convert something to the grayscale colors and this is actually a pretty good example because this red and this orange are so close together they're almost impossible to get them separated inside a he Forge so the first thing I want to do is I want to go to this website called vectorizer doai and I'm just going to drag drop my image up on here and it's going to upload it and then it's going to process it and what it's going to do is it's going to create a vector image of this that can be opened up as an SVG file so here we have the original image and the vector result and as you can see you can look and see how much cleaner now all this is and it it's really a great tool this is I got to say it's is free let's go ahead and we want to adjust a number of colors here so I'm going to go in here and this is showing a bunch of colors right that's 32 colors that's one color two colors two colors this kind of the transparency as a color which H Forge won't count so we don't need to worry about that one there's the third color fourth and there's a fifth so the five is those are the colors that I want to get right there I'll have black and white and orange and red on here so that's actually Four colors but this shown the transparency so once I get just I select five I hit okay and it's going to rocess the vectorization of this particular image okay now that's done so here's our new version this is the original bit map this is the new one once I'm done with that I hit this download button and I want to leave these settings pretty much as they are except for one I want to group make sure I group by color so make sure you do that place shapes and cutouts and shapes below so let's go ahead and download that now okay next what we want to do is we want to open up photopia it's a free online photo editor and this is the actually the desktop version you can go look up photopia most of you probably heard of it it's basically it's a Photoshop clone that runs in a browser window so how crazy is that so of course you're going to get all this uh on the side you get all this uh advertising I think you can probably pay for it and get get rid of that but what we want to do is we want to open that SVG we just downloaded now what's really cool about this program and something even Photoshop can't do is when you open the SVG it creates a separate layer for every single element so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to close all these layers up as you can see and now I can turn them off and on and you can see what we got actually I want to get an outline of this first so I'll grab this little rectangle tool and I'll just grab this and put it right here and snap it in like that and I'm G now I'm going to turn it off and then I'm going to go and click on this magic wand tool and I want to make sure that I sample all the layers and I'm going to click it right here and as you I don't know if you can see but it's actually selects everything in the transparent area and with this shape one selected I'll click the little mask button and then I'll hit control I in invert so now when I look at this that's what I have now why I put this little rectangle here if I double click on this I can actually change the color of that to anything I want and since this is going to be the background I'm going to change that to White and I'm going to move the whole thing down down to the botom bottom just like that okay so now once that's done I'm going to turn the rest of these off actually I'll turn them all off and I'll go ahead look and this one right here this is some outlines and stuff I'm not sure some kind of Gap stuff that might be used for printing I don't know but I'm going to just delete that then I'll go and turn this one on and I'm going to call this one white but I don't need that because I already have this other one down here so so I'm going to delete that too and this one we're going to call Black and this one of course is going to be orange and this one's going to be red now I want to take each one of these I'm going to convert them to Smart object and once I've done that I'm going to go ahead and rasterize them so I basically now have a layer that says red right same here taking that so keep in mind inside these folders are all just different outlines right they're different Vector shapes I'm going to take this turn it on and we'll say convert to Smart object and we'll do the same thing rasterize and we'll go here take this convert to Smart object and then rasterize okay and then we turn this on so if we turn all these on now we have our image that we're ready to go but they're not grayscale yet so how do we fix that so the way we do that is we're going to take this rectangle again I'm going to go on top very top and I'm going to select this red that gray and I'm going to hold my ALT button down and click between the red and this so it's going to basically take the red color and apply that gray to it and then I'm going to hold the ALT key down I'm going to drag it right down below it and now it's going to apply that gray color to the orange one and I'm going to roll the all key down and drag down below it and so now we have that same gray the black we know is 0 00 0 so let's just change this color to Black we're just going to move that all to Black just by double clicking on that rectangle so now we have orange and red let's take a look at those which one's darker the red is probably a little darker so I'm going to set that one to 33% and I'll set the orange to 66% so now we have a white is 100% black is zero the orange we said was going to be 66% let's turn that on and then the red is going to be darker it's going to be 33% so now we've created even steps we have 100% 0% 33% 66% so they're all even once this is done I can say file export as ping and we'll hit say on that just going to put it in the same folder that we were in now let's open up Hue Forge okay now that we're in Hue Forge let's go ahead and open up this image and let's take a look at it we know we want white and black which are already here and then we're going to want a red color which is the darker one and we want an orange color which is the lighter one okay so this is what we have and you can see that we can get there but we just certainly can't keep we can't get white we can almost get white but now once we go down to here we lose that black so we have to push that up now this is faded so you can see we're having quite some TR trouble getting there this is about as close as we can get let's moveth the smoothing completely off we still have this tinge so now let's take the grayscale and drop it in see what happens this gets much better so now we can adjust the see a little bit more and the white looks really good black looks really good everything looks much better now so that's the methodology that you use to create a grayscale image and you can play around with it you be surprised the results you get even if you start with a photographic image and you convert it using the AI vectorizer tool and and then convert it to grayscales and photopia so thanks for watching come visit us on our Discord and we look forward to seeing you online [Music] bye

Channel: chippwalters

Views: 6,250

Keywords: 3Dprint, Blender, HueForge

Id: HMTvCoPVv48

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023