Accurate color reproduction is important in many applications of 3D printing, from design prototypes to 3D color copies or portraits. Although full color is available via other technologies, multi-jet printers have greater potential for graphical 3D printing, in terms of reproducing complex appearance properties. However, to date these printers cannot produce full color, and doing so poses substantial technical challenges, from the shear amount of data to the translucency of the available color materials. In this article, we propose an error diffusion halftoning approach to achieve full color with multi-jet printers, which operates on multiple isosurfaces or layers within the object. We propose a novel traversal algorithm for voxel surfaces, which allows the transfer of existing error diffusion algorithms from 2D printing. The resulting prints faithfully reproduce colors, color gradients and fine-scale details.
We consider the problem of quantization for surface graphs. In particular, we generalize the process of error diffusion to meshes and then compare different paths on the surface when used for error diffusion. We suggest paths for processing mesh elements that lead to better distributions of available neighbors for error diffusion. We demonstrate the potential benefit of error diffusion at several mesh processing applications: quantization of differential mesh coordinates, including an extension to animated geometry, and vertex subset selection for mesh simplification. These applications allow us to compare different paths objectively. We find that the linear time solution results in excellent overall performance, outperforming other traversals taken from the literature. We conclude that the proposed path can be taken as a starting point for any application of error diffusion on meshes. Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsThe problem of quantization for surface graphs is considered.The process of error diffusion generalized to meshes.Paths for processing mesh elements are suggested.The benefit of error diffusion at mesh processing applications is demonstrated.