Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer

INDX anticipation intensifies!

This is exactly what I was hoping for to knock Bambu down a few notches.... Definitely makes Prusa an even better contender in the space.

There's a growing community around the OrcaSlicer - Full Spectrum fork that started all of this, which is attributed in the article. It's a cool technique and I expect all of the mainstream slicers will have it soon. You could already do this technique with OrcaSlicer with Prusa printers or cheaper options like the Snapmaker U1

The "Prusa ColorMix Cones" model is not what I'd recommend. I don't know why they made it like that for 3 and 4 colors other than to do something different than what the community was already doing. For 4 colors the PeggyPallette mini they used as inspiration is a much better model: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2519356-peggypalette-mini-3... You specifically want the dome shape to visualize how the layers blend at different angles. The fixed angle of the cones in the Prusa model misses the point and I don't know why they did that other than to be different.

The article goes on at length about their filament mixing model which sounds cool until you see the part that they only tested with Prusament PLA. Again, I think the open source community was already doing a good job with this.

There are several filament databases other than the one they're linking to that have TD values, which sprang out of the HueForge community. There are cheap tools from small makers to measure TD and color, too. One database: https://3dfilamentprofiles.com/

I'm glad they gave attribution to some of the sources of all of these ideas, but to be completely honest it's getting a little tiring to see everything the open source communities do get wrapped up, prefixed with a Prusa- brand prefix, and resold to us. Make sure you look beyond the Prusa official everything to get a sense of what the community is doing with all of this. I know I'm going to get downvoted for saying anything that isn't 100% pro-Prusa, but this is one topic where the open source community is quite a bit ahead and it's worth looking at what's out there.

From what I've seen in the blog post, this is underselling it a bit. They did improve on the color mixing model, and they're launching filaments to match to make it an end-to-end product.

No this isn't rocket science, and there's definitely a vibrant FOSS community actually pioneering this and that is probably the best place to be on the true frontier, but there is productization effort here. Considering people always advocate for Bambu for "making it easy to buy", Prusa also deserves credit when they try. They certainly get knocked when they don't.

As someone deeply embedded into the FOSS community myself, it's sometimes really annoying when we sabotage the better players. It only helps the worse ones.

Well said. They’re also sharing everything!

PrusaSlicer is used as a base by some others, they’ll get this.

Version 3 is coming soon, they’ve promised good things. I’m curious what shows up.

They also open sourced their color mixing model so if people think it’s better they can switch. And they’re using and adding their stuff to the open print tag database they’ve already cooperated with others on.

This seems like all upside to the community to me.