Neotkotour

§6 — Colour

SVG stickers

Load a vector drawing, click the top or the bottom face of a part, and every colour of the drawing becomes a recipe made from your four filaments. That is the quick part. The fun part is that any of those recipes can be swapped for one of your own: a stripe, a weave, a ramp. A HueForge kind of result, with vectors and sharp edges, on any flat face.

  • no gate
  • experimental
  • 2.3.8, own tab and multicolour 2.4.8

Where ColorStitch Painter›Sticker tool›Load SVG…›Stickers tab

What a sticker is

A sticker is not geometry. The SVG becomes a flat mask on the face, and each colour region of it carries a Sandwich recipe that is worked out when you slice. Nothing is added to the model, nothing to boolean, nothing to clean up afterwards. Stack several and the topmost wins where they overlap.

  • Multicolour. Every colour of the drawing gets its own recipe from your four filaments, Flat or ColorStitch. Backgrounds are dropped, see through shapes are merged, CSS colours are read, and linear gradients print as bands or as one ColorStitch ramp.
  • Top or bottom. It sits on the top face or on the bottom one (the face on the bed, or the underside of an overhang). Bottom recipes are worked out as seen from the bed.
  • You can see it. Every sticker shows in the painter and in the normal 3D view, cut to the face it sits on.

From an SVG to a pattern, step by step

A rainbow on a white disc, four filaments loaded: white, magenta, yellow and cyan. The drawing asks for six colours, none of which is in a spool. Download the example project and follow along.

Before you slice the example

After opening it, turn Enable prime tower off and on again, or the tower may not show up. It is an odd bug we still have to look into.

  1. Put the sticker on. Pick the Sticker tool, press Load SVG…, keep Use the SVG colours ticked and click the top face. In the Place tab you can rotate it, size it, mirror it or fit it to the object, and drag it across the face.

    The rainbow sticker placed on the disc, with the Stickers tab open on Place: side, rotate, size and the layer list
    The sticker on the disc. One layer, six colours, a recipe for each.

  2. Slice and look at it in RealColor. The preview mixes the passes with the TD of each filament, so you see roughly what the print will look like before you print it. Every band came out as a soft tone made from the four spools.

    The sliced disc in RealColor: the six bands of the rainbow as soft tones mixed from white, magenta, yellow and cyan
    The automatic recipes, sliced, in RealColor.

  3. Pick the colour you want to change. In Colours, each square is one colour of the drawing: the top half is what the SVG asks for, the bottom half what your filaments give. Click one and you see its recipe, how far it is from the target (ΔE) and the closest other recipes.

    The Colours tab of the sticker: six squares, the blue one selected, its recipe drawn as Top and Penultimate passes, and its distance to the target
    The blue band selected: what the SVG wanted, what the spools give, and the recipe behind it.

  4. Change its recipe for the effect you want. Edit in Pro opens that recipe in the Pro tab. Here the band became two ColorStitch passes of white and magenta at 45° on top and another underneath: a stripe, not a tone. Back to sticker takes you back.

    Pro tab editing a recipe of the sticker: Top with two ColorStitch passes of white and magenta at 45 degrees and a Penultimate ColorStitch pass
    The same band, now a ColorStitch stripe of white and magenta.

  5. Slice again. That one band now prints as a pink and white stripe, while the rest of the rainbow keeps its tones.

    The sliced disc in RealColor after the change: one band of the rainbow is now a fine pink and white stripe
    Five bands as tones, one as a pattern.
Patterns, not only tones

The automatic recipes get you close to the drawing's colours. Every recipe is still a recipe, so any colour region can become a stripe, a weave, a gradient or a solid of one spool. The drawing decides where; you decide what prints there.

Try it on the rainbow

demo Each colour of the SVG becomes a recipe click a band, change its recipe
The colours are mixed with the tour's port of the app's optics (ColorSci.cpp, real algorithm), TD 5 for the three colours, over a white part. The search here tries one or two passes of 0.04 to 0.28 mm each; the app's own search tries more and can pick a different recipe. The stripe uses the pattern engine (SurfaceColorMix.cpp). Drawing: Fluent Emoji, MIT.

Editing a sticker

The pencil on a layer opens its controls right under the layer list, in the same tab. Place has the side, rotation, size, mirror and a button to restore its proportion if the object was scaled unevenly. Colours has the row of squares, each recipe drawn as in Pro, the closest other recipes, Edit in Pro, and a cap on how many recipes the sticker may use, with Reduce to merge the closest ones. Recompute all redoes every recipe as Flat or as ColorStitch, with the number of bands for gradients.

The catch

  • A sticker covers everything under it. Hand painted zones and MMU paint both: it is applied last.
  • The 3D view draws each colour as a flat swatch. A weave or a smooth gradient shows in the recipe and in the slice, not yet on the model. RealColor in the preview is the place to judge it.
  • Gradients: linear ones are read. Radial gradients, which many emoji sets use, are not a promise; try the SVG first.
  • Wall recolouring recipes don't recolour walls on a sticker. The Place tab warns.
  • Booleans and Split don't keep stickers yet. The painting carries over, the stickers do not.
  • Sliced and checked in the G-code; not yet proven over many prints.