Multi-Color 3D Print Models

Colour is the part most generators throw away. Hi3D keeps a clean albedo map alongside the mesh, so your multi-material printer has real colour information to work from.

Free & unlimitedNo signupPBR textures

Drag an image here or click to upload

We'll turn it into a high-quality 3D model — free, no account needed

Free and anonymous. Protected by Cloudflare Turnstile.

Colour That Survives the Print Pipeline

Textured Mesh for AMS and MMU

Multi-material systems — Bambu's AMS, Prusa's MMU, the Mosaic Palette — need to know which regions of a model are which colour before they can assign filaments. That information has to come from somewhere, and a bare STL simply does not carry it. Hi3D exports a GLB containing the mesh and its baked albedo map together, so slicers and colour-painting tools that read textured formats can pick the regions up directly instead of asking you to hand-paint every facet. The de-lighting pass matters more here than anywhere else: a shadow baked into the texture would be read as a genuine colour change and assigned its own filament.

Clean Region Boundaries

A multi-colour print is only as good as the borders between its colours. Fuzzy, gradient-heavy textures produce dithered filament changes, wasted purge material and muddy edges on the finished part. Because Hi3D generates the texture against a UV layout derived from the actual topology, colour boundaries land on the surface where the source image put them and stay sharp instead of smearing across a seam. When you reduce the texture to a printable palette in your slicer, those crisp boundaries turn into clean filament splits rather than a speckled transition zone.

STL When You Want a Single Colour

Not every model in a project needs colour, and multi-material printing costs time and purge waste on every change. The same Hi3D generation also exports STL, the raw geometry with no texture at all, for parts you intend to print in one filament. Working from one reconstruction for both routes means the single-colour version is dimensionally identical to the multi-colour one — useful when you are printing a test piece to check fit before committing to a long multi-material job.

Making a Multi-Color Print Model

  1. A flatly lit product photo prepared for multi-color 3D print model generation

    Step 1: Photograph With Flat Light

    Colour fidelity starts at the camera. Shoot in diffuse, even light with no coloured bounce, so the albedo the generator recovers matches the object's real colours rather than the lamp's temperature. Strong shadows are the main enemy of a clean colour split.

  2. Hi3D generating a colour-accurate textured mesh for multi-material printing

    Step 2: Generate Mesh and Albedo

    Hi3D reconstructs the geometry and bakes a de-lit albedo onto it in one pass. Preview the result in the browser and check that the colour regions you care about are distinct and land where you expect on the surface.

  3. Assigning filament colours to a Hi3D generated model in a multi-material slicer

    Step 3: Export GLB, Then Assign Filaments

    Download the GLB and import it into a slicer or colour-painting tool that reads textured formats. Map the texture regions onto your loaded filaments, tune the purge volume, and print. Use the STL export instead for any part you are printing in a single colour.

Multi-Color Output Specifications

Colour printing depends on what the export file actually carries. These are the properties of a Hi3D generation as they matter to a multi-material workflow.

FeatureDetails
Colour DataBaked PBR albedo map, de-lit before baking
Colour ExportGLB — mesh and texture in a single file
Editable ExportOBJ + MTL with the texture as a standalone image
Single-Colour ExportSTL — geometry only, no texture
MeshWatertight and manifold, identical across all three exports

Frequently Asked Questions

Use the GLB export. It is the only one of the three that carries the colour information, bundling the mesh and its baked albedo map into a single file that colour-capable slicers and painting tools can read. STL contains no colour data at all by design, and OBJ works but arrives as several files you have to keep together, which is easy to get wrong.

Keep exploring Hi3D

Every Hi3D page runs on the same free image to 3D engine. Pick the workflow closest to what you are building.

Turn Any Idea Into a Production-Ready 3D Model

Generate high-fidelity 3D models from images in seconds.

Try Free →