Eight color chameleon print on a toolchanger

Nov 09, 2026 Last reply: 2 hours ago 4 Replies
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Most multicolor printing I see relies on one nozzle swapping filament back and forth, which usually piles up purge waste. This build takes a different route: a chameleon test print done in eight colors on an H3C with a toolchanger, so each color gets its own tool and the maker said these tests would not be viable without that setup.



The model is a colormix chameleon hosted on Printables, printed on an H2C plate that fits the H3C only if plate detection is skipped. The plate is a Biqu one, and the maker likes it for its first layer adhesion. It carries a Creality snowflake graphic with brand lettering on a blue surface. The perch is yellow and tan filament, while the body mixes shades of blue, orange, red, and white, clinging to a slender curved column.



The job ran 13 hours and 48 minutes and produced eight poops, one per color at the first layer, with the purge chute never kept busy. Through the timelapse the printhead alternates between the model and the rectangular purge tower to clear nozzles at each change, and by the end the chameleon stands vertically along its perch. The maker called the result really clean.



The obvious trade-off is the prime tower, which the maker admits is large but treats as the price for a clean print, while assuming it will be optimized down in the future. Even as-is, it reads as a strong test of what eight-color output can look like.


Running an H2C plate with automatic detection skipped seems like a clever workaround to me. The upside is access to a plate the maker already likes for first layer adhesion. The trade-off is that the machine's automatic plate detection stays off for the whole job, so that convenience is given up in exchange.

The purge tower next to the chameleon looks pretty substantial. Why does it need to be that big when every color has its own tool on this printer? I would have guessed individual tools could prime with far less material than a shared tower requires.

The explanation given is that retracted filament has to be pushed out before it flows correctly, so the tower primes each tool after it has been sitting idle. The maker has also said the tower should be optimized down in the future, so the current size may just reflect settings that have not been tuned yet.

Since the maker already expects the prime tower can be optimized down, a concrete next step would be a second run with the tower scaled smaller and the result compared against this clean print. If quality holds, the waste drops on every future job, and given the planned use for metrology rigs with inset labels, trimming that tower seems worth testing early.

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