Make:: Steph Grimes, DHF’s Director of Education, was the first to share. She presented the results of a series of experiments with affordable hobby paints on printed parts.
While many demos for painting/coating 3D printed parts emphasize sanding and priming as an essential first step, she rejected this route with a practical educator’s eye towards what the young Maker will be willing to incorporate into their own projects
6 comments:
I’ve seen hydrographic printing done on a plethora of objects ranging from nails, to electric violins, to motorcycle bodies. From watching so many videos, I feel that I have a general knowledge about how the process works, and could probably do it fairly well if I ever had a need. The one thing about this video that could have been done better is if he had made a larger clean water gap to bring back up the octopus. If you go through the film again, sometimes it leaves a print and so the pattern isn’t quite perfect. This is definitely one of the better ways that I have seen to paint 3D printed objects. I remember Monica 3D printed a ball of pennies last year, and she struggled to paint it well because the surface was not friendly to most materials. Plastics of any kind are always hard to paint, but because of the slight texture, it makes it that much more difficult.
This has got to be one of the easiest things I can think of that will allow for fast results. I’d always wondered what kind of process this was to have to get a design like that. I mean I think that it is probably a similar technique with camouflage on helmets and gear that allows for consistency in the work. It seems like you can do it for almost anything you want to do. Why wouldn’t you? If you were able to pick up a similar pattern paper to what you were looking for, put it in water, adhere a spray to it, and then drop your item of choice and have it ready just like that? Heck yeah. When there is a will, there is a way. Now you get to amaze kids, and help with the frustrations that come with poor artistic painting skills such as myself. I’m good with a base coat, but it would take plenty of practice and persistence before I could become consistent.
This article was the perfect end to my night. I've always been fascinated with 3D printing and how to use more of it in the future. But this video makes me so much happier about the process because now you can add prints to your models. I feel like once I graduate college there will be a machine that will do the prints for you. So creating the model and giving it whatever color you want would be so cool and super convenient. I mean just printing in 3D is amazing, however, it seems to be a way bigger process then just printing out white pieces of paper with information on them. I know some facilities on campus have 3D printing. Hopefully I'll be able to use those materials when I join the program. But going back to the article, I find it confusing that no one thought of using hydrographic film for the 3D prints. I wish it could've been discovered sooner.
I have seen some demos of people using CNC tech to precisely orient and place hyrdoprinting processes onto 3D objects, and I understand that it is used in some industrial processes, although I don’t know where. I have never seen a DIY for students demo though, its really cool that certain patterns and images are available for the home market now, but what will be really cool is when there is a good home system, software and hardware, available that allows users to create and place custom images onto 3D models. I understand the complications in the process, needing to create a 3D model with image applied appropriately to it, needing to be able to “unfold” the surface image on the part into a printable flat sheet, and then needing to be able orient the 3D model into the hydroprinting bath. But those are all solvable software and hardware solution.
What a cool concept. Who knew that you could print with water? Hydrographic printing is becoming more more popular and the results that it yields are crazy. The first question I ask when 3-D print was if there was a way to get ride of the lines that the dispenser left behind. Now, not only can you get rid of them but you can also add a custom pattern to your 3-D object. The article talks a lot about how the product works and the steps you need to take to do, but what I want to know is how to print your own objects. Can this be done on a standard ink jet printer or is a special machine needed to duplicate a design. Granted, this product is still in the development stages and the method used is still being tweaked for efficiency. But overall this is a very cool way to customize your prints, I’m eager to see what Shawn comes up with next for the ever growing #-D print world.
I've never seen a hydrographic print transfer before, but I'm really interested in how the chemical processes behind it work. I don't know what you would normally use this kind of process for but I think the idea to use it with 3D prints is really innovative and should be embraced more. I haven't done that much 3D printing so far, but as someone who is very interested in the craft I'm always excited to find out more about the printing technology and how to improve/further it aesthetically. From my limited experience with 3D prints, the surface of a more complex 3D print is often hard to paint. While spray paint can work decently well, there are always issues of paint build up in tighter ridges of your print. This hydrographic process solves many of those problems as the print is submerged in the graphic allowing the treatment to sink into all the seams and create a finished continuous paint treatment. I hope this process see's more use in the 3D print world, because it's a great way to apply more complex treatments to objects rather quickly.
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