Computational Hydrographic Printing for accurately painting complex 3D objects

Researchers have come up with a new way of accurately painting 3D printed objects
While the 3D printing technology has developed in leaps and bounds over the past few years, painting printed objects has been held back by problems of how to colour complex patterns both accurately and efficiently.
Hydrographic printing is a well-known technique in industry for transferring color inks on a thin film to the surface of a manufactured 3D object. It enables high-quality coloring of object surfaces and works with a wide range of materials, but suffers from the inability to accurately register color texture to complex surface geometries. Thus, it is hardly usable by ordinary users with customized shapes and textures. So, the Traditional hydrographic printing is mainly used for coloring 3D shapes with repeated color patterns.
Now, Researchers at Zhejiang University and Columbia University have found a way to precisely affix complex coloring to objects, making them look somewhat photo-real. They presented a new computational hydrographic printing method that inherits the versatility of traditional hydrographic printing, while also enabling precise alignment of surface textures to possibly complex 3D surfaces
Computational hydrographic printing is a lot like standard hydrographic printing except a 3D vision system like Microsoft Kinect it used to create a precise texture map. This texture map accurately predicts the stretching before it happens and comes up with a film design to counteract the distortion
When dealing with complex surfaces, the team has extended their method to enable multiple immersions, each with a different object orientation, in order the combined colors of individual immersions could form a desired texture on the object surface.
This new method is cost-effective and can be used on a range of materials, from plastic to porcelain.
Video Credit: Changxi Zheng (Source Video • Computational Hydrogra... )
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