Welcome to Fractal Forums

Greetings,

I just made my first couple printable .stl files using Voxelstack and I couldn't be more excited! First one is printing now!

I was thinking now if I could just get multiple colors working that would be even more amazing!

Does anyone know if it is possible to either output the voxel in RGB (then I can manipulate the colors, etc. in an other program if needed).

Or can I filter what is drawn to the Voxelstack based on color? For instance I would love to make a two color print, and in Mandelbulb 3D my geometry is two different colors..

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

Hello and welcome to the forums   O0

Before we had the voxel export feature a few people had success making animations adjusting the Z Start and Z End parameters and rendering with the "cut" option.

I never had good luck with that, but maybe one of the people who did can explain it better.

I assume these would be color, but that was at the time when we were just starting the effort to export 3D file formats so there may be a quality issue I never understood.

Good luck with it and feel free to post some of your stuff in our gallery or threads  (Hint: The Annual Contest is coming up and photos of 3D Prints may just count this year!)   :elvis:

Hah thanks for the welcome!    :D

When will you know if 3D prints are allowed? I will definitely post some pics here once its done printing.

So can anyone confirm that this can be done with the voxelstack? Does it work solely on height, or can the color be a factor?

P.S.

Can someone please point me to the file that renders the voxelstack bitmap?

I want to take a look to see how difficult implementing RGB instead of bitmap output might be...

I have it on good authority that 3D Prints  (actually, pictures of them) will be an option in our "Anything Goes" category this year, but am not really supposed to say anything before the contest is Officially announced in the upcoming weeks   :police:

As for Voxel stacks - they are just images, png files usually.  There is no hidden magic data in them, so color should be possible.  Like I said, I never had success with the z start and z end method, but think I recall Jesse  (MB3D's programmer) posting an example m3a file to learn from.  I'll look around for it when I get a chance.


Sorry, the source code for MB3D is not open.  So any modifications will need to come from Jesse directly, and I think he's on a Personal Leave for a while.  Real life can be a bother   :sad1:

Neato! Man would I love to see a full color print!


I understand that the voxel stack are just images, but the problem for doing color voxel stacks, is that they are bitmap (black or white). They contain no color data as far as I know how to do. If there is a way to make them color then I would super appreciate learning how to do that because then I would be in like flint (flint buried in an fractal alien landscape)!


I see. I can't complain because the software is so amazing, but I was hoping to take a look because I have developed a number of image filters so I am proficient  working with rasters.

Well I have plenty to play with for now, but I can't stop imagining these prints in color!

Hi.

I found the thread with the post by Jesse containing the attachment for the z start / end animation which may give a color voxel stack : http://www.fractalforums.com/general-discussion/looking-for-fractal-software-with-good-%27voxel-stack%27-export-capabilities/msg57779/#msg57779

I tried it, and while I got color images, I could not make a useful obj file from them.  My software prefers obj to stl or other voxel options, so your mileage may vary.

Hope it works for you   O0

Hi there!

Great thanks for the link! I am not sure I understand but it sounds very promising!

Do you think they mean the z start and z end settings that are under "Position" in the main window?

Then once the z start and end settings are set I assume you set keyframes. How do you use the animation in conjunction with the Voxelstack generator?



Excellent! Could you please show me a screenshot of one of the voxel slices?

That's what is animating if you examine the parameters you will see what is happening  (open the position tab, load the m3a, place the values from the 1st keyframe to the main window and look at the settings, then place the values from the 2nd keyframe and see what changed.  Basically z start and end are all that is being animated.


The m3a example has the keyframes set.


You don't.  This is an old example from the days before the voxel utility existed!  The images rendered from the animation are your voxel stack.  That's why I pointed out that a voxel stack is just an image sequence, nothing more or less.


Sure!

(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/x_zps5f2c408f.jpg) (http://s106.photobucket.com/user/sockratease/media/x_zps5f2c408f.jpg.html)

Cool thanks for the explanation. Playing with settings now!

Meanwhile, as promised, here is a pic of the first 3 3D prints I have done:

(http://3dtopo.com/XB7A5361.jpg)

The orange one was printed at draft mode and I haven't cleaned the purple one up yet...

Well I have tried as suggested but I can't seem to get nearly the same results as the Voxelstack for my test project.

When I do the animation using the identical settings as posted on the older thread I see a bunch of colors (spherical color gradient) that is not in my regular render views at all. I have some other minor issues, but that I think seems to be the show stopper for me at the minute.

What I would really love to see is a color option for the voxelstack. It would just output RGB instead of bitmaps. That would be amazing!

what is in your point of view the difference between rgb and bitmap ? ;)
its the same ...

The difference is RGB is three 8 bit channels. Bitmaps is a single 1-bit channel.