by combining 2D sublimation techniques with 3D printing we can achieve full color photorealistic first layers this video is your complete guide and there's no special 3D printer [Music] [Music] required I love it when I get to Showcase amazing work from the community which is what I'm about to do recently I was contacted by Johan who shared a video of a 3D print featuring a full color surface but printed on a regular single color 3D printer Johan is from nerds pH who provide a range of maker services including 3D printing and prototyping to the Philippines Johan invited me to try this technique and invited me to make a video guide and to help he shared with me detailed results of his own testing so full credit to him and here we go this Tech technique uses sublimation so the first question is what exactly is that the definition is when a substance transitions directly from a solid to a gas State without becoming a liquid state in between and specifically what we're concerned with for this video is D sublimation a version of this it's very common is when we take a shirt specifically one made from polyester and after printing sublimation die onto sublimation paper we use a heat press to transfer the dye to the shirt as you can see this process is extremely effective and it's what we're trying to replicate but incorporating 3D printing in this guide for those looking to start a business around sublimation you would typically invest in an industrial quality printer the trouble is these aren't exactly cheap and you wouldn't spend this much for our experiment but fortunately we don't have to a popular method is to take an Epson ecotank printer and convert it over just like Shaq has here and the key thing about the Epsom printers is they don't use heat during the print process therefore the sublimation ink won't change States now Johan was using one of the fancier ones and you can see they take six types of ink and this apparently can give more control over the exact colors however these are pretty expensive if you're just doing this for fun so we're looking for a cheaper option if we look at the Home and Office range we can see that the prices are a lot better but don't worry we can still do better than this in Australia the cheapest model is the ecotank et1 1810 it's readily available at the equivalent of 160 the cheapest model in the USA is the ET 2400 from places like Staples and Walmart you can pick it up for 180 us and you might find it cheaper new or secondhand on Amazon but I caution against getting a secondhand one because as you'll see we're not using the regular ink with it any machine from the ecotank range will do and I understand that many won't want to purchase another 2D printer but it's worth seeing what this technique can do before making up your mind we're going to start by preparing our Eco tank printer for sublimation and in case it wasn't obvious this will void your warranty another thing to note is that the ink that comes with the printer can be sold to offset the cost because we won't be using it at all however don't get rid of the bespoke bottles just yet the special thing about this Ecco tank range is that they don't take ink cartridges instead they have ink reservoirs at the front that we fill up just like filling up oil in a car and the level for each is shown in these front windows the easiest way to set up the printer is to download the official app after pairing with the printer one of the first things you'll be asked to do is to load up the ink although of course we're going to load up some sublimation die rather than the ink that came with the printer typically these are gravity filled however the top of the ink bottles have a special valve on them that interfaces with the slot and prevents any spills the problem here is that the sublimation dye bottles do not have the matching nozzle so we need to do some problem solving Yan uses 3D printed bottle adapters combined with a 3D printed funnel that goes on the printer to minimize the mess when adding dye another common method is to get a syringe and suck up the sublimation dye drawing it carefully to avoid spills and then pressing the syringe to deposit the dye inside the printer's tanks alternatively you could empty the ink bottles that came with the printer transferring it into another container before thoroughly washing the ink bottles and their special cap and then pouring the sublimation dieye into the original clean bottles but in my opinion what I ended up doing is better than any of these options I purchased this kit that came with sublimation paper all of the sublimation dieses instructions and most importantly four empty containers with the specialist top required so in my case all I had to do was Squirt the sublimation dye into these containers and then pop the container into the top of the filler everything from here is automatic the D will go down into the storage Reservoir and stop automatically once it reaches the top and when you're done you pull it up with a special valve preventing any leakage nice and clean and nice and convenient we repeat for the other three colors until the app that we're ready to continue then you start the initialization process as far as I know this primes the inside of the printer with the die this takes just over 10 minutes and during that time you set up your printer's Wi-Fi connection as well as setting up the printer in your operating system this was pretty easy and everything went smoothly for me finally We Run The Print head alignment this will print out a page with a number of patterns on a grid and to complete this calibration all we need to do is to select which one looks the best test from the drop- down menus the printer doesn't know or care that it has sublimation die instead of ink inside it's now ready to go let's start with a T-shirt and rekindle the Bromance by picking my friend Sam Prince with me shamelessly stealing this image from his Instagram I've linked it below go and follow him I then pasted it into Photoshop cut out the background cropped it and very importantly mirrored the image from left to right as for printing it out it's just like using any other 2D printer you just load up sublimation paper and hit print and then a few seconds later you and your new sublimation printer will be very happy when Sam pops out to say hello I chose to cut out the image just to make it easier to Center on the shirt but as you'll see I butchered that part like I always do on garments we put our print face down with a piece of Grease proof paper underneath the top layer of the shirt so it doesn't go through to the back for your heat press you're going to set it to just over 200° a sublimation takes place at around 195 you should have instructions on the back of your p paper but for mine it was 1 minute at high pressure and I soon discovered that my heat press is measured in degre fah instead of De C so when I peeled back the paper the image was way too faint so I repositioned it turned up the temperature went for another minute and got this fantastic result as you can see pretty much all of the dye has been transferred onto the T-shirt and when we remove the grease prooof paper from underneath the shirt is ready to go to help justify the price of the 2D printer you can make your own custom clothes CL like the S printer special you're seeing here but what about the 3D printing integration the first job is to print off another copy of s Prince and the printer that I've chosen is the bamboo lab A1 because it prints all of the filaments you'll see quite well being a beds Slinger it's easy to access the bed and importantly for me it has the exact same bed as the X1 and P1 series because of this I have a few spare beds and specifically an engineering plate all of the other surfaces that bamboo lab have seem to be sck stickers on top of this but whatever coating the engineering plate has it seems to be directly bonded to the spring steel sheet it's very Hardy and as you'll see perfectly suited for our purposes however if you don't have an engineering plate I think most beds would still be fine to attach our print out to the bed we're going to use regular glue stick we glue the image this time face up directly to the bed and for this first test print I'm using white TPU and it's just a big slab of a rectangle to completely cover the image on printers like this with the nozzle touches the bed and is used for auto bed leveling it does so when the nozzle temperature is lower than 195 which means the sublimation D will not yet be activated yet as Yan discovered with a lot of trial and error as the printer lays down the first layer the sufficient heat and pressure to activate the die and transfer the image onto the bottom of the print there are print settings that we need to change to get the best results and we'll cover those in detail in the next portion of the video but for now this was just dipping my toe in the water which is why it's so ridiculous that I picked such a large image as this print took around 4 hours but when the print was done I pulled back the TPU and was quite excited to find the image transfer was excellent especially for a first attempt and I'm so glad that Sam Prentice was here to share it with me that's the proof of concept complete so let's go over the best settings to formulate this guide on top of all the incredible notes and settings that Johan had given to me I printed out a grid of s prentices and 3D printed a disc into the middle of each so I could quickly compare back toback settings small changes can make a significant difference so let's jump in the first thing we need to do is set up our slicer to have low and slow first layers for this process we want a ridiculous amount of first layer squish we don't want any gaps at all in between the extrusions or we'll see them in the image now some of what you're seeing here is just paper stuck to the surface and you'll find that that and any residue brushes off even under cold water but any gaps in the Extrusion will remain in the finished image here I've saved the sublimation profile so let me take you through the changes you want your first layer speed for both the first layer and infiel to be nice and slow we're talking 5 mm/ Second and maybe something around 10 mm/ second tops if you're impatient this does greatly increase the print time but the rest of the print will run at normal speed at least your filament profile won't need much change because no doubt the first layer temperatures will be above 195 regardless of the filament but just make sure you have part Cooling turned off for at least the first two layers I tested TPU PLA and petg with similar results for each the print stick really well to the sublimation paper so heated bed temperature is not critical I use 60° or more like I normally would depending on filament that's the slow but what about the low on a m and 3D printer we can just change LZ offset moving the nozzle down to create more squish the same goes if we're running a Clipper machine it's very easy to get some more squish however I'm on a bamboo lab printer and they don't offer Direct Control of first layer squish but that doesn't mean there's not a way if we come to our printer settings and then machine gcode we can click the edit button for the start G-Code and then scroll all the way to the bottom and here we see a section of conditional G-Code adding extra squish for the textured Pei plate there's nothing to stop us from copying this line and then pasting it just after the conditional section where we can alter this value to increase the amount of Squish you'll need to do some trial and error here but I lowered mine Bit by Bit arriving on a final value of minus. one2 you don't want this in place for your regular prints so make sure to save a copy of the standard printer profile dedicated to sublimation the downside of the first layer being artificially low is you're going to get a lot of additional filament being extruded this should correct itself over the rest of the print but keep an eye out for buildup in this process the first layer is everything so it's not surprising that first layer infill pattern is quite important quite often you will see the pattern of the first layer infill in the surface of the sublimated image and this effect is exacerbated if you don't have enough squish based on mine and Johan's testing the normal monotonic straight line infill has a tendency to slightly undere extrude in longer segments which we can see as gaps I would suggest changing to an infill pattern such as concentric that shortens the extrusions as much as possible yet in these examples we can see in the longer sections at the outside we start to have the gaps again a good pattern to try is the hbt Curve as no matter how big the first layer is the infield pattern will remain small and intricate sometimes you can still make out the pattern but generally it's a lot more subtle when putting down our sublimation paper glue is messy but it does work best I also tried some blue painters tape to hold down small images and for small images it seems to work not too bad however I did notice that without enough tape the paper would curl up and the print along with it therefore for best results and especially if the image is large a thin smear of glue around the Border of the image as well as a few spots in between should prove to be quite reliable fortunately the glue does come off quite easily as soon as we introduce some warm water and something like an old card as a scraper there are some tricks you can use to boost color saturation you might have noticed that the colors when sublimating to fabric are a lot stronger and more Vivid than those we get when 3D printing to assist with this Johan recommended sublimation spray which we would put onto the printed page and that should assist in the transfer of color and I did try to buy some but instead they sent me this glitter body spray at least now I can always be the brightest star in the room fortunately for me and you Johan had an even simpler solution as soon as the 2D print was done take the page load it back into the machine and hit print once more printing the exact same image over the top of the first as you can see this works remarkably well with the colors being much more saturated note that you might get a slight amount of blurriness if the page shifts ever so slightly the second time it goes through and with no other changes this double printing is very effective Johan also noted that he got stronger colors when using matte filaments finally some tips on positioning the paper and the print to match each other there's a big variation here in where the disc aligns with Sam's face and that's because when I was doing my quick testing I just stuck the image roughly in the middle Yan's solution was to print a template that would remain on the printer bed and be aligned with a disc inserted into the graphics he had good success with this and said it could be used several times my Approach was a bit different I modeled out the maximum size of the bed and then Drew this centering pattern in the middle I then printed this onto the bed in PG but without any infill when the print is done this should leave a small passageway where you can use a Sharpie to trace the centering pattern a few times I slipped but fortunately this doesn't have to be perfect I chose PG because even at 80° it barely sticks to the engineering plate therefore it's very easy to remove the printed temp template I would recommend cleaning this with IPA which will get rid of any excess ink left on the surface after around a minute you'll get rid of the excess and there'll be plenty left for you to see and in case you were wondering the Sharpie won't be removed by the normal cleaning process we used to get off any remaining paper and glue now the real beauty of this technique is that for our sublimation print profile we can load in the model of the stdl and then we'll have the same centering pattern on the print preview as well as the physical bed to fully take advantage of this I start started adding centering registration marks to my sublimation images and that really helped me get everything perfectly aligned even if you don't have a spare build plate like me you should still be able to print with the Sharpie in place with regular filaments okay so now you know how to use this technique but you might still be wondering why would I spend the money on a 2d printer what are some of the applications for combining sublimation with 3D printing well firstly remember that for a return on your investment you can make and sell custom garments to order or any other products that typically use sublimation these heat presses are very cheap on places like AliExpress and if you're running an Etsy store for custom 30 prints sublimation opens up whole new avenues you could now produce all man of custom items such as phone cases printing on Demand with customers images honestly who wouldn't want a customized phone case just like this it's true we can only color the first layer with this technique but many people already buy beds with special patterns just to make that first layer better and sublimation is much more versatile we can now replicate any material we want such as wood grain or perhaps carbon fiber but we can still go further for instance when operating this animatronic face I would frequently forget what controls did what so to fix this I headed back to the cad exported a dxf off the top surface imported this into illustrator dreo some graphics mirrored them from left to right prior to 2D Printing and used my grid system to match the positioning the end result takes functional printing to a whole new level and I'll no longer have to explain how this works the next time someone has a turn and finally we get great benefits by making our items truly 3D here we have a simple image which I've traced in illustrator and then exported that as a vector which I then imported into on shape before giving it some thickness and building up a stand and supports the end result is something my son loves it's a custom piece that only he owns and the integrated built-in stand works perfectly you're probably wondering how durable the sublimation is and they answer is extremely here I take another piece of the same plastic and I scratch it as hard as I can I can also do the same thing with my fingernail and as you see no effect we already know that this is waterproof but what about something like isopro alcohol again just like the water this has absolutely zero effect once the sublimation takes place it's well and truly bonded to the plastic and it should remain for the foreseeable future I'm well aware that this won't be for everyone but personally I'm always looking for ways to expand the things that I can make so this appeals to me greatly let me know if you feel the same way and if you're going to give it a turn a huge thanks to Johan for both inventing the technique and making my pathway so much easier in making this video thank you so much for watching and until next time happy sublimation 3D printing good day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time