[man of mettle]

I have created a model in Rhino and applied materials and texture in Maxwell using the plugin, in this case a logo layered over a material. It renders perfectly. But I want a 3d printing company to print the model with the requisite color and texture. I cannot figure out how to export to them successfully. I have exported the model as a .wrl, but the company is telling me that the file does not work for them. They are using ColorJet 3D (http://3space.us/colorjet/).

How can I export the texture and color so it can be printed? Any help appreciated.

[dk2079]

Afaik, most color 3d printers will only accept vertex colour information.
So you need to bake the textures into the underlying mesh, assuming it has sufficient mesh density to capture the textures detail.
I am not in front of a computer atm... But there are some possibilities to do such a thing in rhino... And you can definitely get it done in grasshopper

[man of mettle]

Thanks. I thought it might have to do with baking, but I can find no documentation with Rhino for that.

[JDHill]

Yeah, basically: for each material in the model, use photoshop to create a texture that is a composite of all the (color, not roughness, etc) textures used in the Maxwell material. Then, use those textures to texture a copy of the model. Then, find out if the company can use something like OBJ with .mtl & textures; if so, export the files and send, otherwise, as dk2079 says, you will have to find some way of baking the textures into the meshes.

[edit: I don't know any way of doing the baking -- at that point, I'd ask on the McNeel forum, since as you see, this process will not be related at all to Maxwell.]

[JDHill]

And actually, for compositing the textures, there is a way you can do this using Maxwell:

• - Save a copy of the scene.
  - Delete all the geometry.
  - Create a square plane.
  - Create a camera with square resolution.
  - Place the camera perpendicular to the plane.
  - Move the camera so that the plane fills the view.
  - Switch the environment to Sky Dome.
  - Apply one of your materials to the plane.
  - Start FIRE.
  - Adjust the camera exposure as desired.
  - Adjust the camera resolution for the desired texture size.
  - Render the scene in Maxwell.

This assumes you are not using multiple custom texture projections in Rhino; if your material has textures using different channels, in order to have them mapped differently on geometry, then when you stack them all up into one image like this, they won't map back to the geometry in the same way.

Provided that's not the case, you can use this method to get Maxwell to composite your textures (and a bit more -- the whole material, really) for you. Once you have it set up, it's not too difficult to drop a material, export an MXS, drop another, export another, and so forth, and then batch-render the lot. Should be easier, anyway, and surely more accurate, than doing it manually in photoshop.

[man of mettle]

Thanks for the suggestion. I am not sure I understand exactly, and my deadline forced me to hire someone else to do the work. Alas. Probably it is a matter for Maxwell to address or some enterprising developer who can create a bake plug-in for Rhino and Maxwell.