Customizable Filament Swatch

Customizable Filament Swatch

A fully parametric filament reference card you can print in any filament to build a physical color library. Designed to fit standard 3" × 2" index card label pockets so you can stick one onto every filament storage box and tell at a glance what's inside.

Each swatch shows the filament's translucency at three different wall thicknesses across the top, plus a customizable label with brand, type, color name, max volumetric speed, and drying spec.

Single filament change for the two-tone text.

Pairs with My Filament Storage System

These swatches are sized to drop into the index card pockets on filament storage boxes — see my shelving system here: Easy Rearrange Shelves for Filament Containers. Together they make a clean, scannable storage setup where every box is visually identified front-and-center.

About the Swatch

The top edge has three translucency-test windows of decreasing thickness so you can see how much light your filament transmits at different wall depths:

• Top-left window: 0.2 mm thick — thinnest, most light transmission
• Top-middle window: open (0 mm) — left as a finger slot for pulling the swatch out of the index pocket
• Top-right window: 0.4 mm thick — medium
• Recess area under the text: 0.6 mm thick — the label floor
• Text: sits 0.4 mm above the plate. The top 2 layers of the swatch + the raised text print in a second color using a single filament change.

Workflow

1. Open the customizer and use the Label Text tab to type in your filament's info. Hit Generate.
2. If a row overflows (long color names are the usual culprit), lower the font-size sliders for that row until it fits. The Left and Right fields on rows 3 and 4 share a baseline — if one wraps, set both to the same size to keep them aligned. Re-generate after each change.
3. Most other settings can stay at their defaults. Many more options are available below if you want to tweak — but if you mess things up, click Reset All Parameters to start over.
4. Skip the Preview Colors tab. Those only affect the MakerWorld preview, not the actual print.
5. Download as 3MF and open in Bambu Studio (or your slicer of choice).
6. Assign filaments:
   • Filament 1: the filament this swatch is for (the one named on the label)
   • Filament 2: white or black of the same material type, for the color-change layer
7. Slice and print. Optional: enabling Arachne for the perimeter generator makes small text noticeably cleaner — I run it on these.
8. Let the bed cool fully before removing. The thin 0.2 mm window can deform or tear if you pry the swatch off while still warm.

Extra Notes / Advanced

• The window thicknesses are adjustable in the Slot Fill Depth tab. 0 makes a window into a true cut-through hole (which I keep on the middle one as a finger slot). 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 are good comparison values for most filaments — bump higher for very opaque ones.
• Resizing the swatch is possible but be careful: if you shrink the overall plate without also shrinking the recess and label sliders, the recess can end up bigger than the plate and the geometry breaks. Keep the recess proportional if you change dimensions.
• Print settings: designed for 0.2 mm layer height with a 0.4 mm nozzle. The single-color-change math depends on the 0.2 mm layer height — if you print at a different layer height the color split won't land cleanly on a layer boundary.