is there a way to customise the travel path

[Adamsk1 0]

i want to customise the build path so that the outside of a coin is one colour, the nozzle goes over and prints a block, so i can pause the print, and change colours, and then come back, so the main goal is that the coin has one colour outside, and one colour inside. keep in mind i have an ender 3 v2 so i have to manually switch colours. is there a way to easily do this, or at least customise the travel path so i can do this, feel free to ask questions if you want me to be more specific.

 

[Slashee_the_Cow 409]

So you want to do something like this?

(If not, you might have to give me a better picture to go by)

 

Is it possible? Almost anything is if you try hard enough.

Is it easy? Your best bet is to separate the outside and the inside into two separate meshes and tell Cura not to combine them (don't worry, they'd be fine sitting next to each other like that), but then you'd need either need to insert pauses manually in the gcode or find or post-processing script that will do it on mesh change (I don't know of any off the top of my head, but - famous last words - not too hard in theory).

Is it practical? No. You'd have to change the colour twice per layer - it can't print a few layers of one colour then a few of the other. Unless it's a giant coin, you're going to have to sit in front of it and spend twice as much time changing colours as it does actually printing. Plus you'd end up with a bunch of strings and blobs and such to clean up because it needs to retract every change and a Bowden extruder isn't really quick enough to keep up with a trick like this.

 

Most of the time when people do multicolour prints on a single extruder machine, they do different features ending at different heights so they only have to change the colour every few layers. This still has the downside of colour banding if you look at it from the side (since it's only doing one colour at a time for every few layers).

[Adamsk1 0]

good idea, i did think about that when i was doing it but the print is quite specific, but, i did think of a solution kind of, i dont mind swapping the filament twice per layer as it literally is going to be 2 layers, and if you are curious i am modeling a kill medal from halo.

you can see what i meant, by literally only like 2 layers, and also this is what i have made

so its hard to tell but its a few layer set down, so you get the reason why i want the outside one colour and the inside another, but i was thinking, if i wanted to i could slow the print down and then pause swap, and like i said i only have to do this like 2 times so i think it will be fine just slowing it down, or making it larger. 

[Slashee_the_Cow 409]

Ah, you want to make the interior of the volume a different colour? That's not too hard. You just need to use the Pause At Height post-processing script twice (once for each change). Set the correct layer, set the standby temperature to your normal temperature, then when it pauses, just pull the filament out of the extruder and push your new one until it starts drooling the correct colour (then just take out the drool with tweezers or something before you unpause it).

 

But you will still have the problem of banding - the colour you do on the interior will also be the outside colour for those layers. And it's still extremely impractical to even try and change colour every layer twice to prevent that.

 

Also important: it takes a few layers of any colour (especially white, although the opposite is also true, you don't need much black to cover anything) before you can't see whatever colour is beneath it. At a 0.2mm layer height I usually do at least four layers per colour. And that white surface will be sitting on top of yellow support.

[Adamsk1 0]

ill show you how it works out