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Articulated Seahorse

  (work in progress blog) I want to tell my experience and story about the creation of MELS 3D LABS Articulated Seahorse. Of all the Articulated designs, this has a unique story and place among them all. Early 2024, i was researching for an articulation no other designer has ever made. It should be an interesting creature as well, my research led me to seahorse, a beautiful creation of nature.  THE SCULPTING My sculpting workflow evolved over the years,  a systematic, hence its time consuming but foolproof approach to perfection. Typically i sculpt 2-3 days straight, mostly skipping  breakfast as i get hyper obsessive. The sculpting path : Typically i could create a link and the body section, where then i can duplicate it, then scale it down and keep duplicating it up to the tail. That would save a lot of time and effort. But for the seahorse, This wasn’t the case. The body is curved, hence even after duplicating, each link has to be precisely sculpted to preserve th...

Color Madness: 7 Color Mixing Extruder

VIBGYOR COLOR MODEL

RGB contains of three channels (Red, Green, Blue) Each channel is an 8 bit number string.

A bit can consist of 2 values, (0 or 1).

where with 2 bits we can store 4 values

(00, 01, 10,11)

 where 8 bit can store 256 values 

ie; 2^n = 2^8 =256

where 0 is considered a value, hence 256-1 = 255

now with 3 channels of 256 values (shades), we can get a maximum color shades of 16777216 shades of colors.

ie; 256 * 256 * 256 = 16777216 color shades

But the human eyes cannot differentiate or perceive most of the Colors, unless you are a tetrachromat, where you are able to see upto 100 million colors when the average human would see under 10 million.

How many colors are in the world?

It is infinite, but the colors an average humans can see is estimated around 5-10 millions, depending on person.

A modern computer screen shows over 16 million hues of color to show a single image. There are LCD displays that can reproduce each RGB Channel in 10 bits giving 1.073 billion color shades. But Simply we cant differentiate much of the colors.

In 3d printing, Mixing just 3 colors like RGB to create all possible shades has limitations, using just 3 extruders to mix colors accurately and efficiently is practically impossible,

To overcome this issue, i designed VIBGYOR Color model, where we can use 7 different colors of a rainbow to create more complex gradients and shades efficiently in 3D printing.

With 7 colors mixed, we can create,

256 * 256 * 265 * 256 * 256 * 265 * 256 combinations.

which is 72057594037927936 colors

Yes that's insane!! but practically, we can bookmark our favourite combination of those values and 3D print with them without the need to change filament ever and we can create a random color code where the printer may surprise us with a cool looking print.




EXTRUDER RANDOM COLOR GENERATOR

A cool feature to add would be to have a color generator either as a slicer plugin or in the firmware.

Where the color codes can be randomly generated or selected based on the criteria users set. The result could be crappy or wonderful, which i think would be an awesome way to explore deep into the color concept.

Currently the project is in slow progress as many other projects are in development.

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