I want to print my own procedurally generated volumetric models using chitubox. Rather than converting and exporting these models to STL or some surface mesh, it makes much more sense for me to feed these models as volumetric data to chitubox directly.
The first thing that comes to mind is simply saving my volume model as a set of PNGs in the ZIP file format, importing those into chitubox, and then saving to a sliced format of choice appropriate for the printer. To facilitate that, I imagine first saving a ZIP file with the right dimensions, compatible gcode, and all.
However, I see quite a few threads here about issues with importing zip files, even the ones generated by chitubox itself. Is there a specification somewhere, outlining what it takes to generate a valid chitubox ZIP file?
Or would there be a better way to implement such a workflow altogether? Perhaps using another format than the ZIP files?
And is it even true that chitubox can convert from a ZIP format to any other supported export format? Or does chitubox fundamentally require a surface mesh as an input, in order to be able to build up all the internal state to run all file export logic?