V6 - Updates
Started to flesh out the Infill section
V5 - Updates
Section4 - started to write about infil
6-end - inserted a new Secton 6 "Fuzzy Skin" renumbered all the sections after
7.2 (was 6.2) added a picture
V4 - Updates
5.2 Color by Modifier [V4]
V3 - Updates:
5.4: Color by layer [v3]
5.5: Trick to swap colors around - temporarily create more extruders [v3]
V2 - Updates:
What to do if you model doesn't fit on the bed [V2]
This is a basic shortcut. Let's say you have a model with LOTS of parts. Most of the parts you want with one infill (and other options) but a significant number of parts you want a different infill (and other options). You can tediously select each part on the right hand view and set its settings OR you can set up one part on the right hand side.
Then COPY (Control-C, Command-C on Mac) the settings from that one THEN you select each part in turn on the right
and PASTE (Control-V, Command-V on Mac) the settings.
You can get a Brim for the supports, it's just called something different. It is called “Print Settings→Support Material → First Layer Expansion”
—-Sadly this only works at an OBJECT not a PART level……
This is a strange one. I can't find out how to do this myself, but there is a trick to get this. If you go to this model on Printables: https://www.printables.com/model/674707-medieval-knight-armor-for-dummy-13
Now download the “armor_plate_PLA_Prusa_MK3S.3mf”
Now open that in the slicer as a project. Notice that a bunch of the objects have “Support Material” options on a per object basis. This is not what is strange, what is strange is that when you select the per object “Support Material” option for a particular object you will notice (bottom right) that the “Style” is indicated.
DIFFERENT OBJECTS IN THIS MODEL HAVE DIFFERENT STYLES!!!!
What is even a bigger deal is you can import this into you copy of prusaslicer for a different model, then on the right you can elect the “Support Material” Options (top right) and COPY (Control C) then you can go do a different object and PASTE (Control V) those options onto that object. Now you on your object now have the same support material overrides - feel free on lower right of that object to delete (X) any overrides you don't want - NOW YOU CAN USE THE PULL DOWN FOR STYLE and change the style for JUST THAT OBJECT.
Thus you can have one object on your build plate with SNUG and another with ORGANIC !!!
This one is simple, “Print Settings→Multiple Extruders→Wipe tower→ Wipe tower brim width” set it to some number (I like 10) I hate it when the wipe tower falls over.
it used to be you could easily rotate the wipetower by typing the angle you want (on the right) after selecting the wipe tower like any other object. Not anymore now it’s just obscure - you select the wipe tower, then click “Rotate” on the left and then pull that handle (blue).
when using an incompatible support material for full contact supports (eg: petg supports for pla model OR pla support for petg model) you run into the problem that your wipetower could collapse since the slicer uses whichever material is in hand for the structure of the tower.
I used to get around this by in the multimaterial tab setting the wipetower structure extruder to one of the model ones.
The problem with this is it’s not efficient- for example assuming extruders 1,2,3,4 are pla and 5 is petg you have the problem that if you pick 2 for the structure you are going to have a lot more moves than you need
Well by carefully reading the help I found that if you set the soluble flag on the filament that’s the support one and only that one - the slicer will attempt NOT to use that one for the structure of the wipetower.
“Fillaments→Advanced→Soluble Material”
There is a feature “Print Settings→Multiple Extruders→Wipe tower→ No sparse layers (EXPERIMENTAL)” which can significantly reduced the amount of fillament used in the wipe tower. Instead of the tower being as tall as the object it only prints a layer of the wipe tower whenever it needs to switch tool heads. It moves the print bed up and down so that it can do this. IT IS IMPORTANT that you leave room in front of the wipe tower for the gantry so that it has someplace to be. Otherwise it can crash into things. It used to be if you had a fillament run out or any other strange condition while it was on the wipe tower it would just PLOW through whatever it had printed to reach the front of the printer. A recent firmware release has improved this - I do not know if there are still conditions where this will happen, so be warned.
In the next picture you see room I have left. The wipe tower in this case is somewhat lower than the large object. While the room is overlapping the top of the pumpkin that is ok as those layers all have tool changes so the tower will be at least as high as them. It's only when you have layers of only one toolhead that you won't get a layer in the tower.
Increasing perimeters and top/bottom layers not infill percentage gives much more rigidity to an object. I tend to use 5-15% infill density, Sometimes I increase the density by part or modified section (see below)
Grant on his podcast: https://www.printables.com/@3DMusketeers tells us to never use 100% infill but instead to increase the number of perimeters and walls to very large numbers.
The default infill in most slicers is "GRID". This infill has lots to be desired. Especially when working with PETG it creates buildup on the nozzles as the crossing does not seem to be on alternate layers but actually within each layer.
Try the following Infills;
Gyroid - Slow to print. All the voids are actually connected. Seems to be strong in all directions. Fights warping I think.
Adaptive Cubic - Faster than Gyroid.
Support Cubic - Like Adaptive Cubic but gets denser as it moves up a void, designed to support the top layer.
Lightning - Not designed for strength at all just designed to support the top layer
You can control the infill type and percentage by part of an object.
You can put a modifier on a section of the object and change the infill type and percentage for that area. This is very useful to add strength around a screw hole for example. You can add a cylinder modifier around the screw hole with a stronger matrix than the model as a whole.
Assuming you are useing grip infill (please dont), you can rotate the infill - this is useful since the grid may align with an edge of the model and rotating it can improve the strength and reduce warping.
I hear lots of people who seem to think the only way to have different colors in a model is to use the paint tool. Before grabbing that tool consider the following…
See also: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/multi-material-painting_262620
Lots of objects can be separated into parts, the parts are often already there. Select the object and pull down and select “Seperate into parts”
PICTURE HERE
you can then on the right set the extruder for each part seperately.
When there isnt already a part - dont grab that paintbrush yet. Consider adding a Modifier object to your print and setting the extruder for the modifier.
For this example I will be useing a simple cube. In prusaslicer you right click on the object.
For this example I want to add a circle in the center of the cubes face. I could add another shape, or load a STL just to use its geometry as the modifier, or use TEXT as a modifier, or an SVG etc.
I find "Object Coordinates" useful here, since x=0, y=0 will be close to the center of the original object which in this case is a cube. Of course more complex geometry means more difficult math.
Also change the SIZE (dont forget to unlock that gray lock if you dont want your size change to be uniform)
You may want to remember the Z coordinate of the part you are placing this on. The Z coordinate will be the CENTER of that part (unless you did some rotations). Thus the top of the part is its "Z Position" + 1/2 * "Z Size".
Now on the upper right pane you can find the cylinder you added and change its extruder.
The slicer seems to have a built in hierarchy for which color to use for a particular area, the following are in what seem to be increasing priority.
The color of the object
The color of the part
The color of a modifier
The color you painted
For example these shields for the dummy 13 knight https://www.printables.com/model/674707-medieval-knight-armor-for-dummy-13 were unadorned. I wanted to add the star.
First I added a modifer that was the star https://www.printables.com/model/151076-star-of-david-magen-david - I set its extruder to the color I wanted of the star. Now I wanted a background color of only the area on the front of the shield not the border or the back of the shield. So what I had to do was set the color of the entire shield to the background color I wanted (blue or white) then I had to paint the gray extruder on everything else. You might think I could have set the color of the sheild to gray and paint the background area blue/white but if I had done that it would have taken priority over the star modifier!
One of the oldest ways to change colors, is by layer. Prusaslicer makes this easy. Just slice your model then
move the orange vertical scroll bar to the layer where you want the colorchange, click on the “+” and a color menu comes up to the right. Click one of the colors and then click that red window control.
Dont forget to reslice. All of the operations necessary to change fillament will be inserted into your gcode at that point.
Let's say you have a model painted to use all of your extruders. And you want to swap the colors around.
Of course you can do this when you go to print the model, even through prusaconect ( https://www.printables.com/article/how-to-assign-spooljoin-filament-from-prusaconnect-rZvbwjZ ) but you want to do it permanently in your .3mf file. Go to Printers→General→Extruders (make sure you are in Expert mode #2 in picture)
Just increase the number of Extruders. You can then use the ‘addition’ extruders as placeholders.
It is then simple to use the “Bucket Fill” to replace one of the real extruders with one of these “Fake” extruders.
Use them, swap the colors around, just remember when you are all done to go back to your Printers definition and change the number of extruders back.
PRO TIP: when you slice, look at the results and make sure you only have 5 extruders in your model :-)
COMPLEX FEATURE INTERACTION
If you assign fuzzy skin as an attribute of a part and you CUT the object in order to fit it as multiple prints, BEWARE when you cut across the part you now have two copies of the part, one in one object (you just created) the other in the other. The issue is that the fuzzy skin can now leak into the cut area - the CUT isn't special it's just you now have two objects and two copies of that part. You probably dont want a fuzzy area where you are trying to glue the object back together. Sadly adding a modifier across the cut faces saying NO fuzzy skin, or modifying the fuzzy skin parameters seems to have a lower priority than the fuzzy skin being assigned to the part. What you will have to do is REMOVE the fuzzy skin from the now TWO copies of the part (one in each object) and instead PAINT on the fuzzy skin on the faces of both of the object that are not inside of the cut.
When using the multiple printbed feature https://help.prusa3d.com/article/multiple-build-plates-on-prusaslicer_823894 sadly you cant have different configurations by bed. While I wouldnt want different beds to be for different printers, I would love to be able to have different fillaments selected to drive the bed tempature by bed. This way a multimaterial project could have all the PETG parts on one bed and all the PLA parts on another (see https://www.printables.com/model/593185-dummy-13-printable-jointed-figure-beta-files for an example of when you would do this). I still want to put all the beds in one 3mf file as it’s easier to be organized. Anyway my hack is to add a NON PRINTING text object to the bed with a note reminding me what to change.
In the example below an object that was just text was added to the printbed and marked NOT TO print in the window on the right.
This assumes you are set up to see filename extensions (that is your .3mf file looks like this in your filemanager: “myfile.3mf” and not like this “myfile”.
The .3mf files is just a zip file which is a collection of other files. If you want to look inside all you have to do is add .zip to the very end of the file name. ( “myfile.3mf”→ “myfile.3mf.zip” ) I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU DO THIS TO A COPY ! Then depending on your operating system (I use mac and ios) you can just double click the .zip file and it will either launch a zip tool OR create a folder with the same name as the .zip file without the .zip. You can then look inside this. You will see a bunch of files of various file extension types. Most of these are just text files with various different names. If you want to look inside one of these, just add .txt to the end of the file name. For example “Slic3r_PE_model.config” → “Slic3r_PE_model.config.txt” you can then open this file and read all of the fun settings.
Why? Well, first off you could do this to two different versions of the same model and using text based tools you can “diff” the files to see what you changed. Second, I see a possible tool in the future that reduces file space by creating versioned .3mf files so one could efficently store multiple versions of the same model. Third, I could envision a tool that lets one swap around the extruders/colors being used in a multicolor model. Fourth, it might be possible to build a tool to convert different vendors versions of the .3mf file from one to the other, but ….
Before you go cutting that model up (not that the cut tool is bad) - consider that you can print the model on the diagonal. Realize that the diagonal of a square is longer than the square. Just ROTATE the z axis. BUT realize you won't be able to easily scale things in x&y after you do this, so make a copy, and work before you rotate it. NOW you have a problem since you can't really work on a model that doest fit, the darn thing keeps turning blue. so… do the trick below
TRICK: Go to the PrintersTab and Change your bed shape to be bigger (Just remember to change it back before you actually slice to print). This is handy even if you are cutting the model up as you may need/want to work on it before you cut it up.
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