Support for rendering color gradients on mesh and/or slice preview

[odd08 0]

I noticed that Cura supports different colors for mesh and slice views, but I don't see any instance of rendering with color gradient. This is typically achieved by specifying color (or some value) at the vertices and the render interpolates the color inside the triangle (in mesh view) or the gcode line (in the slice view). Is anyone aware that Cura supports this or if it's in the cards. Thanks!

[Tyronnosaurus 7]

Hey, late reply but good news. What you want to do is exactly how Cura works behind the scenes. When adding a triangle (or quad, or line...), Cura uses setVertexColor() on each of its 3 vertices, but uses the same color so there's no gradient.

 

What you can do is first create your mesh with your primitives, and afterwards go vertex by vertex changing the color.

 

For example, I tested it on this cube I built for a project of mine. It's made up of 10x10x10 quads. Mind you, quads are actually just a pair of triangles:

 

Then I used this code to randomize the color of every vertex:

def PrepareMeshBuilder(self):
    ...
    [Here goes code to add primitives (tris, quads...), calculate normals, etc.]
    ...
    
    import random
    for vIndex,_ in enumerate(self.mb.getVertices()):
        r = random.randint(0, 255)
        g = random.randint(0, 255)
        b = random.randint(0, 255)
        self.mb.setVertexColor(vIndex, Color(r, g, b, 255))

 

And got this:

 

Edit:

If I were you, I would override or create a custom addFace() method that took 3 colors instead of 1 and applied them directly. This way you could create your triangles and paint them at the same time.

 

Edited February 3, 2021 by Tyronnosaurus

[odd08 0]

This is great! Thank you.