H2C problems with 1k filament changes.

[Ed Street]

I ran across this on Reddit yesterday. its quite interesting what he has to say on the system after doing some testing.  It also shines some ugly light on how (why?) Bambu's using their weird engineering to create and then fix problems. Since the 'wiper' is there, they must have known about the problem, since they put a half-baked solution in there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/1psgfft/my_experience_with_10k_filament_changes_on_the/

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

Interesting. Tiny tool paths! 

[Ed Street]

Yes indeed.  If memory serves me correctly, that was one of the topics on the podcast recently-ish.  Not sure which episode, but it was mentioned, and that pre-dates the H2C as well.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

Tiny toolpaths… I.e. when the extruder leaves just a tiny amount of material before a material change… is an inherent problem for multi materials-FDM. It seems the approach Bambu has taken has added a few more critical failure points besides those already known that are related to pressure within the nozzle.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

How were the patterns made on the outer surface? Were they painted using the paint tool?
I would love to try this on the XL.

[Ed Street]

In the modeling app, create a sketch of the pattern, then project it onto the destination object, extrude the projection by 0.01mm (enough for the slicer to recognize the texture), then in the slicer, paint the extruded areas.

[Ed Street]

The way he did it was this. It was still a sketch projection, just Blender's messed-up way of doing it.

ProgRanOCc

OP•6d ago

It was quite a learning process. In brief terms, limit the color first of your artwork in photoshop to the colors you plan to print with. I had to edit it a lot by hand to get it to look right. Then in blender with your model, UV unwrap and apply your image and texture to your object. Make sure there is enough triangles on where the texture and image are being applied so it doesn't look terrible when you apply it as a vertex color or displacement map. Bake the color into your geometry as vertex colors. Bake the displacement map by applying a displace modifier. Export as an OBJ keeping the colors. Import to bambu studio and watch as the colors you limited in photoshop get messed up anyways and assign the best you can. Then print and watch it eat up your PTFE tubes.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

I've been digging into how this was done and I'm finding a blank wall. The guy that posted the vase on Makerworld does NOT provide any real info.

[Ed Street]

I was able to get it working.  Here is a screenshot of what i got.  its 16 colors, 5,558 filament swaps!!  If you want I can write up instructions for blender to make this happen.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

I was trying to do it with Projection, but I see it's UV mapping. I'll try again.

[Ed Street]

While this isn't 1k+ swaps, I took it a few steps further and made something functional out of it.  Here are some of my blender settings.  To make it truly detailed, you need a large number of triangles!  Think 2 million +, depending on the level of detail required.

This is a Raspberry Pi 4 case; I 'boosted' it to allow for a PoE hat.

Note here we have 257 swaps, and the flush + tower is more than the print !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

I haven’t tried yet… I’ve been experimenting with multiple color prints. How about posting the .obj file and let’s see if  can do it in PS and the XL?..

[Ed Street]

I did get it working in Prusa Slicer and Orca Slicer.  I have included both of those.  I have the untitled.obj and untiltled.mtl file.  The mtl file references the baked  us_flag.png file.  

I also included the .blend file.   To open the .blend file, I used Blender 5's Layout, UV Editing, and shading tabs.  The original PNG image will likely have to be reloaded, rebaked, and exported to obj.  

Since the files are relatively large, I uploaded them to Google Drive and am sharing the link here for the public.  To correctly display any image file on a print, you first need a high level of triangles, read 2 MILLION+, the more triangles and the smaller they are, the more details you will see in the image in question, but this *WILL* lead to print problems with some areas maybe to small to print and see properly, and you will have to maintain that happy median with printability.

Also, this method of placing an image on a print should work with any image and any print.

Don't bother trying to get Blender to limit to a set number of colors, because once it is Orca-Slicer, you will have to remap the 16 colors to the number of colors you are using.  Second point of ref is Prusa-Slicer does *NOT* support importing colors from an obj file.  The workaround is to work on it first in Bambu Studio or Orca-slicer, save it as a 3MF file, then open it in Prusa-Slicer and save it, because it will now be in the Prusa format for 3MF.

my Google drive link

[Ed Street]

Sorry, forgot the printed image!!  Printed with Ziro silk in Red, White, and Blue with 0.2mm layers.  The image is in 100% of the cases, inside, outside, holes, walls, etc.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

Actually 3mf files going from Bambu to Prusa work fine and retain the separate colors, but the user has to assign the colors to their spools accordingly and having matching colors already on hand never happens in reality. I was able to open the starry night vase with colors fine and will try to print it with whatever colors I have on hand.

I note it’s ALL tiny tool paths!