This week's release includes: * New Full Color Sandstone tutorial. In order to help our designers and makers get the best possible results using our FCS material, we have put together a tutorial for how to best get the expected results from textured model prints. This tutorial illustrates the differences between RGB and CMYK color scales, the impact of wall-thickness on color uniformity, and what to expect in terms of color bleeding and contrast. * Starting a new test with the 'Beta Group'. We're currently testing some new upload functionality with a limited group of community members called the 'Beta Group'. I'm not going to tell you what it is just yet - we'll release it as soon as we can! * New newsletter signup popup. On your first visit to Shapeways, you may now see a signup window asking you to register for our weekly shoppers newsletter. * Many internal updates.
Good stuff, Bart! Is this the new tutorial? https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/designing-for-better-col ors-in-full-color-sandstone BTW, I always wondered the difference between vertex and texture colors with FCS. Know of any good info on that?
Vertex coloring has discrete color values attached to either entire vrml primitives (sphere,cylinder,polyhedron), or to individual corner points (then creating color gradients across faces if necessary). (Think simple snowman model for the first case, heat maps for the second) Texturing wraps a predefined image around a model, so can in principle contain a higher level of detail than the underlying geometry (e.g. image of head mapped onto sphere, or image of landscape mapped onto a simple rectangle)
Thanks, So vertex colors are stored in the 3D model, but textures are a separate image file that needs to be zipped and uploaded with the 3D model...correct? Is there any advantage to using one or the other besides the detailed mapping that you explained above? Does one print better than the other?
With a texture map it's easier to achieve a higher resolution. Also, texture maps are much easier to manipulate afterwards.
A lot of it depends upon your geometry. This is my opinion ONLY: I prefer vertex colors so that I can control the application of the colors more precisely. On this model, http://shpws.me/oAYS I only needed to use vertex colors to achieve the effect i wanted. But, on this model http://shpws.me/owQa the only real option was to use the texture mapping. Trying to do that with vertexes would be a bit crazy. I've struggled badly with getting a brick texture applied to a building. Either they stretch weirdly, or they don't wrap correctly. I've not found a good solution.
I'm never sure what I will get away with using FCS. To create different color features I generally pop them above the surface plane by 0.001 inches or maybe a little more, but always try to keep the feature height less than the width to stay in guidelines. That seems to work but are there any recommendations for what's best to keep the printers happy? I've had colors get dragged close to an inch on a print but I don't know what's related to poor design techniques or what's a printer hiccup. I was bored last night and ventured into that strange world known as railroad accessories design. Came up with this tower. It's all about the brick pattern so the roof is basic. Maybe it's better to leave the roof off and make that separately with FD or FUD along with windows and other building parts. It's supposed to be 1:220 scale but the bricks are 0.055 ' x0.02' which translates to 12.1" x 4.4". Those are more like half height cinder blocks. The mortar gaps are drawn as 0.005" and I didn't dare go smaller. http://shpws.me/q1gD