@bombastinator, I was kinda conflicted about this also. Some say easy to dye and set the color. Some say the temperature has more to do with the color saturation and too hot deforms the 3d print.
Also I heard consistency of color among the peices may also be off.
So I went with white with the idea if I dyed it myself I would have matching peices.
This is new to me, I will be learning as I go LOL
That actually makes a lot of sense to me.
It would depend a great deal on exactly what the color is and when in the process it is added.
A boring long winded treatise on the history of pigments:
Way way back in the day when men wore tights and stuff pigment was ground up elemental minerals. Generaly heavy metals or metal oxides, and often quite toxic. Then coal lake dyes happened. Dyes work differently. They’re often safer and cheaper. A lake is a bit of powdered something that has been dyed to make a pigment. The early dyes were made from coal, hence coal lake dye. These dyes had (and to a lesser degree still have) issues though. They are sensitive to heat, light, and a bunch of other things most of which fade them over time. Some colors fade faster than others. Yellow was particularly bad, followed by magenta. This is why really old printed things are often partial images that are just cyan and black. If a colorant in a plastic is a dye, and it is made up of a mix of dyes, those separate dyes are going to react to different environmental factors differently causing a color change.
What would I do in your position if I wanted a predictable color that would be tough? Paint the thing and clear coat it probably. That they’re dying them instead implies there is some sort of problem I don’t know about. You’ll need to pick your paint carefully. You may want to use a primer as well.
A paint is a binder, a carrier, and a pigment.
The binder is what makes paint stick to what you paint it to. Your binder is going to need to stick to the particular kind of plastic you used. Increasing the surface area of the plastic (very rough sanding) will probably help. Primers are paints that specialize in sticking to stuff but have no strength or colors in them. A “self priming paint” is a primer with pigment in it. The paint then only has to stick to the primer which is often a lot easier.
The carrier shouldn’t matter much. That is the stuff that hardens or evaporates away leaving the dried paint. Not all carriers play well with each other.
While The pigment may matter, I doubt very much the thing is going to be lasting 400 hundred years or something so a dye lake is fine. The paint will wear though and it’s even softer than the plastic.
Therefore you also want some sort of thick strong clear coat.
A clear coat is a paint with no pigment in it. They are often quite tough. They do make things shiny though. For a long time laquer (made from bugs) was the one and only clear coat. Real old times laquer generally has to use pretty high proof alcohol as a carrier. That has changed though. Nowadays there’s all kinds of stuff.
Maybe your best bet will be dying it and clearcoating it for toughness.
