When you have completed the editing of your structures on the 3D Designer Window, you are ready to print the file to a haptic printer. This article explains how to print to a Roland LEF-200 printer. 

Preparing the file to print

Your file should already include a height map, which is either a custom made greyscale layer, or a layer imported by a Cruse® or Metis scanner.

Custom height maps can be made using tools such as Continuous Tone, the Gamma Window, Filters and the Patterns Library. For more information on editing the height map read 'How to edit the 2D and 3D data within 3D Designer' listed in the Related Articles below.

• Go to AVA Menu > Settings and select Printer
• Turn on Spot Printing as demonstrated in the snapshot below:

Setting up the AVA Digital Print Rip 3D data

Do not print directly into the RIP hot folder.  The SRV3 file needs pre-processing in the Layer Splitter before you can print it on the Roland.

Therefore add a new print queue in the rip and call it ‘To split’ and print the file to this folder.

Once the SRV3 has been printed to the ‘To split’ folder, launch LayerSplitter.

1. In the AVA Digital Print RIP, go to File Menu > New Printer, and select the Roland LEF-200.  
2. Enter the printer’s IP address, and press the Connect button.  You won’t be able to set up the printer settings unless you are connected to the printer.

3. You must set the printer settings before printing.  Therefore, go to Printer Settings and ensure you select The Print Mode. 
   
   

4. Go to Queue > Colour Separation and activate your ink setting.
   
   

Using the Layer Splitter to print the height and gloss detail

Printing embossed designs on the Roland LEF-200 requires a multi-pass approach.  The colour image and emboss layers are printed separately, with the printer returning to its start position in between layers.  In order to support this, we use a pre-processing step on the SRV3 file to prepare it for the multi-pass output.  If you open a processed SRV3 file in AVA, you’ll see that the design has got much taller as there are multiple copies of the emboss layer, the LEF-200 driver in the rip expects this, and prints the design at the correct size, cutting the tall page into pieces for each layer printed.

You define the separate printing passes for the Roland in the Layer Splitter.

1. Press ‘+’ to add a mode, and ‘-‘ to remove a mode.
2. When adding a mode, choose the type of print you want to use for that layer.  A good sequence is Emboss (either matte or gloss), then White, then the Image .
3. Click the Convert… button and choose your source SRV3 file.  The output should go in to a print queue for the AVA RIP.
4. The numbers and checkboxes on the white and emboss layers configure the printing:
   • Invert - Cruse® scanners generate a ‘height’ layer which has higher values in the thinner regions of the print.  For convenience you can invert these in Layer Splitter.  Checking ‘Invert’ makes the software treat lower values as thicker in the output.
   • Autoscale - the height map can vary in value from 0 to 100%, but typical output from the scanner won’t use the full range. Checking ‘autoscale’ maps the minimum value in the height map to the minimum thickness and the maximum value to the maximum thickness (values are swapped if invert is used).
   • min - the minimum coverage for the print (in 0..1 units, 0 is no printing, 1 is printing at 100%, values greater than 1 will result in the layer being printed in more than one pass to build up to the required thickness).
   • max - the maximum coverage.  Note that the thicker you make the final print, the longer it will take for it to finish.  Also, the varnish is yellowish, so thicker prints will look like they have a yellow layer on top of them.
   • max per pass - if you lay down too much ink in one pass, the varnish will not cure fully.

With the Ink setting “RL_LEF200_CMYK_V3_Inkset”

Using the Layer Splitter settings below which produces 13 passes.     

100% tone on the Height map layer will = approximately 0.55 mm, 550 microns over 1 Pass of 1 White, 

13 Passes of Emboss (Matte) using max per pass 0.75 coating of gloss is set by you changing the max 13 x 0.75 = 9.75

A micron is 0.001 mm, or a thousandths of a mm.   

Layer Splitter remembers the layer configuration, source and destination folders across launches, so once it is configured you should be able to process new prints easily.

We have noticed when you use the gloss, the thicker the coating the more the colour changes.   

Also as soon are there is more than one coat of gloss you would have to resort to using a spherical spectrophotometer.