Starry Night MultiColor (Diamond Hotend)

thingiverse

I recently installed a 3-color diamond head/hotend to my 3D printer and wanted to create an image color print using Starry Night, a beautiful picture I thought. However, I couldn't find a program to convert a color image into a 3D print, so I created one myself. Yes, I'll admit I'm a mediocre programmer but I'm happy that I made something out of Perl to convert an image to its various colors in multiple ASCII STL files. I sort of wish I had made it output binary STL instead, but that was more work and for now it was good enough (maybe I'll do that in the future). So I took a Vincent Van Gogh Starry Night image into GIMP and converted it to 12 colors at 80x52 sized. I figured that I wanted each pixel (voxel) to be about 1mm cubed, and 80mm was plenty wide, although it could be resized smaller and then made at higher resolution. I didn't want to go too crazy with the number of colors and 12 seemed to allow CMY (without black) to work mostly. So the program I created takes in an image at whatever size and whatever colors and splits them into two STL files per color. This was because I was able to make the blocks wider, but when I tried to merge them in the Y-axis direction, things went weird. So instead, I output every other line into two separate files per color, then imported them to Tinkercad and merged them. I had trouble with registration so I added a registration block - not sure if that will cause problems, so I left the original files without the registration block and not merged also which can be imported into Repetier probably. I had to convert the files to binary STL anyway since Repetier couldn't import the ASCII STLs (yeah, I regret not outputting binary more now). I tried loading it into Repetier and exporting a 3MF file but that didn't seem to work since when I tried to reimport it, it wasn't right. Oh well. So anyway, I've included a text file with the colormap info. The RGB values are correct, but I haven't verified the CMY values in the colormap file so you may want to spot check that if you try it. I haven't tried it yet because I don't have Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow filament yet, and not sure when I'll get around to it. Of course, you'll need to adjust your color extruder weights in your 3D printer's firmware and probably slicer and maybe the host software and elsewhere (it's so easy!) for extruding the correct colors for each color so be aware of that if you aren't already. I have included the ugly Perl program to convert an image to STL files (use at your own risk). Usage: 3dimage.pl input_image_file output_pre_name colormap.txt See the high-res version (0.5mm instead of 1mm cubes) in the higher res zip file. I also added a black and white version of the high res, maybe that's easier for dual-extruders? I don't have Cyan, Magenta, Yellow currently but I do have Black, White, and Blue. So with those colors and editing the image in GIMP, I converted it to print with those colors. I also scaled up the size x=1.6, Y=1.6, and Z=2.0 and gave it a raft to sit on. Yay! I have a first print. I printed it with just black, white, and blue and need to adjust the colors more but hey, it worked for a first try! It sort of looks like a shag carpet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5dXzrsnnq8