Color Improvement in Translucent 3D Printing using Color-Layer Embedding Technique

Full-color three-dimensional (3D) printing technology has been a challenge to maximize color fidelity while preserving advantages of depth appearance of printed objects. Especially for the 3D printer that uses translucent materials, such as the Polylactic Acid (PLA) polymers, colors printed on PLA materials usually appear dull and faint, even with a usual surface-painted technique, due to the complex subsurface light diffusion in translucent objects. In this work, we perform experiments to investigate the color appearance on PLA products printed with various polymer-color structures. Our results show that a double-layer color embedding, with a gap of about 0.4 mm PLA layers, can significantly expand the color gamut of the printed products, showing improvement in comparison to that made with the surface-painted technique. We thus propose this double color-layer embedding technique to enhance the quality of color appearance, while keeping the translucency and depth perception of the 3D printed objects, which can be beneficial in a wide range of applications in the new era of innovation and creativity of consumers.