Mix your own SLA resin — virtually
Find your mixture recipe quicker
Many material manufactures offer a custom-color kit in their lineup that allows hobbyists to mix their own specific color shades from primary colors such as Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, BlacK and White (or CMYKW for short). It’s an appealing alternative to buying a whole collection of pre-mixed resins only for this one specific project. With the correct recipe it should be possible to mix a wide variety of colors, at least in theory. Most of the times, you end up trying multiple mixtures until the color is close enough to your reference.
Iterative recipe development
The mixing kits usually come with a collection of recipes by the manufactures in order to get you started. You enter the total amount of resin needed and it tells you how much of basic ingredients you need to mix. That can be in the form of a document, a spreadsheet table calculator or a webform.
When you want to achieve a very specific color shade there is a lot of trial and error experimentation until the printouts match your intentions. Each time, you mix up a certain amount, do a test print and compare it with your target color.
- This is wasting a lot of resin with the wrong color.
- It is both time consuming and repetitive.
- You need to precisely handle and store the resins, pigments and their mixtures.
Speedup using PrismSlicer
Using the photorealistic preview feature of PrismSlicer you replace this manual experimentation with a virtual process.
In the software, you can adjust the ratios between the individual primaries, eg. 94% white with 6% cyan and then preview your actual object. It doesn’t matter if its large, would require a lot of support structure or takes a long time to print. Computing the preview will always be faster than 3D printing.
Benefits
- You experiment with your final geometry instead of a small test slab.
- You save material and get to the recipe faster.
- You can experiment anywhere, no need to be in the lab.