3D-Druck Duck (DE-EN-Mix)

I mentioned the cute duck emoji at our fablab, someone said "Print" and challenge accepted...

Playing around with gimp, Inkscape and prusaslicer does the job. Use Gimp for flatten the color-range. Use Inkscape for redraw bitmap to colored SVG. Some curve correction by hand. Use intelligent fill in prusaslicer...

The problem is, that the pixel image of the duck from a screenshot is so small that the “Trace Bitmap” feature has nothing to work with. Even trying to get an AI to upscale it and render an SVG from it failed miserably.

I played around a bit with Inkscape and GIMP. Here’s the process I followed:

1. In GIMP, cut out the image from the background, set the mode from RGB to 14-color indexed, and used the “Select by Color” and “Fill” functions, along with a 1-pixel brush, to make all the colored areas as uniform as possible.

2. In Inkscape, trace the bitmap using the “Multicolor” selection mode, identify the areas by color, and vectorize them with a border. Resize to approx. 800x600 pixels, take a screenshot.

3. Back to GIMP: set the mode from RGB to 7-color indexed, fill the areas again (eliminating one more color in the process), and do the fine-tuning by alternating between a 1-pixel brush and the eyedropper tool.

4. Reopen in Inkscape, vectorize the image using the “Color” selection mode. It takes a lot of fine-tuning to adjust the curves so that the closed shapes don’t touch each other; remove the black background area :zany_face: otherwise, when you import it into Prusaslicer, you’ll end up with a solid SVG that’s almost impossible to color differently.

5. Import into Prusaslicer, target Prusa XL with 5 colors. Import the SVG, add a cube and set Z to 2 mm as the base; color each individual recognized area with the smart color fill tool according to the desired color; set the color for the finest, smallest areas to nozzle 4 (0.25 mm), and the base to the color of nozzle 5 (0.6 mm). Scale everything down, then print.