What I've been up to lately...

Hey folks ,

Sorry I've been MIA recently, but I've been busy with some new products as well as updating old ones. When I have something to show you, you'll see it first.

One of the things I have been playing around with lately is a product called HueForge. It's basically for people with 3D printers who want to create very cool 3D paintings. It can do some near photoreal stuff with the way it blends filaments and it's incredibly efficient in how it goes about doing it. 

The idea behind it is that you give it a picture and HueForge uses it as a displacement map on a mesh. You can then add different colors to the different z height levels which represent filament changes for your printer. 

Here are some things I've done with it just playing around.

I'll gladly share some of the HueForge files-- if you have a copy of HueForge and want to mess around with them yourself. I did share the Harley Quinn HueForge file here. Let me know if there are any others anyone would like.

One of the things HueForge struggles with is the ability to print flat shaded items, like signs. Because of the way it works with transparency indexes in filaments, things tend to bleed a bit and it's often difficult to get the right color for a sign you want to create– especially if two colors are similar in value. 

To that end, I have created a workflow that converts color images to grayscales that are much easier to work with inside of HueForge. Here's a video that goes over it. The beginning of the video is interesting as it uses blender to explain how HueForge works.

FWIW, I did receive my Bambu A1-mini and am very very happy with it. As a former Prusa fan and purchaser of 2 mk3s printers, the shift to Bambu has been a delight. It's such a breath of fresh air in a very crowded market where you're expected to want to build , update and continually fix your printers. The Bambu units just work, and the A1-mini is no exception. Not to mention it's a tremendous value at $469 including the AMS lite. I suspect Santa will be putting quite a few of these under the Christmas tree this year!

And, it’s the first time I started using Photopea– the online clone of Photoshop. Wow– just wow. There’s a desktop version you can download for free and it’s pretty spectacular on many levels– and it runs so much faster than my version of Photoshop! Crazy. Even though it’s free, I subscribed to get rid of the ads. I go over it a bit at the end of the video above.

I'm also working on some new videos for kit ops that help explain how to use it in creating new INSERTS. Stay tuned.