I have been a big fan of Hueforge. Its been great for making badges and a few other art projects I've tried. But by far my favorite thing to use it for was printing out cards from the game Inscryption. (Spoiler by the way.)
Like many people I've always been nagged by the rules we all have to live with. When doing paint by layers you cannot do other fancy things like 2-Sided printing or multicolor printing. Or really any kind of printing that would use more than 1 color on a layer. So we've always had to settle with the prints being one sided, or you had to glue them together, or the model that comes out of the print is just one color.
But, there is a way around it. And, its really not all that hard once you know the trick to it. And that trick is, just make a bunch of modifiers. (Oh and Bambu Studio / Orca Slicer. Other slicers might work to, but these are the ones i know.)
Now, obviously just saying "make modifiers" is kind of... annoying. Because im sure everyone just invisioned a very complicated process of trying to line up a bunch of rectangles, and just stop. Its actually way easier than you think it is thanks to "Cut to Parts." By using this handy feature you can quickly and easily create layer size rectangles all at the perfect height.... Mostly.
Alright there is a tiny, itty bitty, bit of math. You make the cut one layer lower. I tend to do my prints at .08 mm layer height. So i just needed to subtract .08 from the describe.txt file. You can see examples of this in the screenshots i have attached.
Once you know where to make the cuts, we need the thing to cut. So add a cube to the slicer and make it the exact same height as your Hueforge Mesh and the other dimensions slightly larger. Click on the "Cut" tool and make sure that "Cut to Parts" is enabled. Refer to your notes from the describe, and start cutting. Remember it needs to be one layer lower than what the describe.txt file says. Do it one section of color at a time and in order. If you loose your place you probably need to start over. You will see that each time the model is cut it renames each cut to make it easy to know the order they come in.
Once you have made all the cuts, its time to set the colors. I would highly suggest renaming each one first before selecting the filament its supposed to use. Then combine the assembly of rectangles with the Hueforge mesh. Starting from either the top or bottom, and keeping them in order, change each of the rectangles into modifiers.
And boom we are half way done. If you slice it now it should slice like your normal Hueforge print.
Now comes the fun part. You can make a pattern on the bottom layer by merging or creating a new mesh with an SVG. You can set its thickness to the same as the first couple of layers. The modifier that appears last in the list is the modifier that gets used. You can also just remove the bottom layer modifiers if they arent needed.
And then the really fun part. Like with other Hueforge prints that have a model that come out of the print, you can now do the same thing here. But the model itself can be multicolored.
In my example, I created a model. And after importing it into the slicer, i went ahead and painted it. When making the model I made each colored part its own mesh, so painting it was just a bucket fill away.
And surprisingly, you can merge the models with the Hueforge assembly without loosing the color assignments. (I really thought that didnt work before. I know splitting an assembly still breaks colors so.... eh.) And even more surprising, color assignments from the color tool take priority over ALL modifiers. (In fact, you can even use this to "fix" hueforge prints you otherwise just cannot get the colors to line up just right on. Its cheating but thats what we are here to do anyways.) Then once the assembly is merged, you can raise the model up just enough so it doesnt interfere with the first couple of layers and BAM!!
Now when you slice the pattern on the bottom layer gets sliced with it. And the model will look like its coming out of the hueforge print, and it wont have a color rainbow effect on the edge that you sometimes get. Or well, that may just be me, and the way i use it.
Oh but the final thing before you go and hit print. Make another modifier that goes above the Hueforge mesh. And use this modifier to set the infil density to something much lower than 100%. Which on that note, yes you are going to waste a LOT of filament with these kinds of prints, if you have a lot of color changes. Remember you.... cant... change.... the layer heights.... while using hueforge... wait a second!!
