GoKawiilEstimated reading time: 12 minutes
For the past few months, the 3D printing community has been poking at a very interesting question: what if a multi-material printer were not limited to the colors physically loaded on it?
And we must say it right now: This is a really awesome way to expand your 3D printing capabilities! In this article and video, we’ll show you how to print with dozens of color tones on any multi-material printer and how we made that possible. It’s a proper deep dive, so get comfy – you’re in for a ride!
Let’s talk about the community – because that’s where it started. Solutions started appearing in slicer forks, test palettes, and increasingly convincing prints. Ratdoux’s OrcaSlicer-FullSpectrum showed how virtual mixed-color filaments could be created by alternating thin layers of differently colored materials. Justin H. Rahb’s filament-mixer helped predict what those colors might look like, and community projects like PeggyPalette made it easier to compare and share results. It was one of those moments where you could feel an idea catching fire in real time. These projects are all amazing and truly demonstrate the benefits of an open-source approach.
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And honestly, we got excited too. Inside Prusa, the idea spread fast: let’s create an easy way to take a couple of filament spools and let people print in dozens of beautiful colors. The teams working on Prusament, PrusaSlicer, EasyPrint, and OpenPrintTag are always pulling in the same direction, and this was the perfect project for them. We calibrated a new, more accurate color mixing model against measured FDM prints, connected it to real material data through the OpenPrintTag Material Database, brought the workflow directly into PrusaSlicer and EasyPrint, and started preparing a dedicated Prusament CMYKW set to make the whole process more reliable from the first print. Why CMYKW? We’ll explain in a second.
The result is a much easier workflow that makes printing in color feel more like painting rather than programming, with more accurate color previews than any existing solution.
Our color mixing model is published under the MIT license, so the community can inspect it, use it, test it, improve it, and build on it just like we built on the work that came before us. We call the model Prusa ColorMix to distinguish it from similar projects and products.
How does it work?
So, how is it possible to print a model that looks almost painted – using just five filaments?
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