How to Make your Prints Glow with Glow in the Dark Resin and Filament
The days are getting a bit darker so we wanted light things up with glow-in-the-dark filament and resin. We’ll be going over some highly dubious chemistry to make glow-in-the-dark resin as well as showcasing some of the top filament.
Glowing Resin
As far as I’m aware, glow-in-the-dark resin doesn’t exist on the market (for good reason) so we made some. Be forewarned, this isn’t something we recommend but it made for some neat pictures. 
We mixed Formlabs’ White Resin with an arbitrary amount of glow-in-the-dark powder. If you’re interested in measurements, I’d estimate we used a bit more than half of a 10 gram container of glow powder in a tank of resin. Using Open Mode, we printed out these Low Poly Moai by steven_dakh. Note that it’s important to use Open Mode as the glow powder will change the properties of the resin.
After spending a bit of time in the sun, our Moai were ready to go. The green and orange powders were by far the most fluorescent but the others produced a fair bit of light as well. If you’re interested in seeing Formlabs’ print quality (with slightly less dubious materials), check out the free sample request form!
ColorFabb Glowing Filament
ColorFabb makes a material called Glowfill that is PLA/PHA based and has glow-in-the-dark powder mixed in. It might have been more appropriate to do several smaller prints with this, but we were feeling ambitious so with the new Star Wars movie coming out, we decided to make a full size storm trooper helmet. The design was comprised of 20 different pieces and we printed each of them out and sanded the edges. The sanding helps make things a bit easier when we get to gluing. 
After several hours of sanding and gluing and frankly much too many super-glue fumes inhaled, our helmet was assembled. Cyanoacrylate based super glue makes for a great adhesive with a variety of different materials. We admittedly shined a high-power studio light on the helmet before taking the next picture but it made the helmet glow very brightly.
You might have noticed the glow-in-the-dark spray paint in our first image. We had mixed results with this but there are a number of brands you can try and it might prove easier than questionable resin chemistry.
Before you go, here are a few designs we think would look great using these materials!
