Bambu Studio OrcaSlicer / SoftFever Profiles for X1 Carbon

OrcaSlicer (Bambu Studio SoftFever) Profiles for X1 Carbon

These are my tweaked/tuned profiles for the X1 Carbon. They are not designed for Bambu P1P printer but may work on it as well, use at own risk. UPDATE LOG CAN BE FOUND ON THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.

What is OrcaSlicer (formerly Bambu Studio SoftFever)?

It's a custom fork of Bambu Studio with some new settings added. You can get it here:
https://github.com/SoftFever/BambuStudio-SoftFever/releases/

What are these profiles?

These are my own profiles I have tweaked/tuned to fit my needs, they may work for you too!

What's different in your profiles?

I have taken advantage of the new settings in SoftFever fork to suit my needs. My profiles are tuned for most prints, providing a mixture of speed, quality, and strength. I won't list every change, but here's the most significant points:

• Separate print profiles for PLA and PETG, as both materials do not quite print the same.
• Enhanced filament profiles for PLA and PETG that I feel work better than the default profiles.
• Enhanced printer profile.

PRINTER / GENERAL

• Textured PEI plate temperatures tuned, default Bambu is too low.
• Arachne slicing is enabled on all profiles; this works great for most models but some it is worse, I keep it on by default unless any issues.
• Seam position set to back instead of aligned, as most people orient their prints facing the camera.
• Seam gap setting tweaked to minimize appearance of seams.
• Using thrutheframe start/end gcode which provides a lot of enhancements, such as smaller purge line, better textured sheet squish, etc.
• Taking advantage of SoftFever small-perimeter speed setting; reduce small-perimeter speed to 50% of standard perimeter speed to provide better quality of small perimeters, specifically small holes.
• Minimum layer height set to 0.10 instead of 0.08 because I find 0.08 to be too risky sometimes when doing adaptive layers. If you want to print in 0.08, you will have to change this in the printer profile.
• Enabled SoftFever experimental clean walls settings.
• Enabled slowdown for overhangs w/ Arachne engine, which is a new feature to SoftFever and missing from the original Bambu Studio.
• Better ironing settings and support settings.
• + More

PLA SPECIFIC

• My PLA profiles are enhanced to provide the best quality at fast speeds.
• Pancake perimeters enabled for better quality on most models.
• Infill is set to Adaptive Cubic for PLA as it provides the best combination of strength, speed, and less material.
• + More

PETG SPECIFIC

• My PETG profiles are enhanced to provide the best quality and strength at the cost of slower speeds.
• Infill is set to Gyroid on PETG because it is strong, somewhat fast, and seems to give me the least amount of problems with PETG.
• PETG speeds and accelerations tuned to improve any ringing or VFA issues.
• Enhanced retraction/travel settings to reduce blobbing and stringing.
• Cooling / fan settings tweaked.
• + More

FILAMENTS

• I have tweaked temperature, flow rate, max volumetric flow, cooling, etc. for filament brands I use the most…
• Atomic, Prusament, eSun, Sunlu.
• Generic profiles for PLA and PETG that should work good with other brands with some flow rate calibration. Please note for generic profiles, these are set to a flow rate of 1.00 for easier flow rate calibration, meant to be used as a starting point for new filament profiles. I recommend using the generic filament profile and running the flow rate calibration from the SoftFever calibration menu, and then making your own filament profile from it with correct flow rate.

How to install?

Download the .json files and go to File > Import > Import configs.

Are these profiles guaranteed to be better?

Nope, due to the nature of 3D printing, some models will print better with some settings over others. However, I feel these settings work well for me, better than stock profiles, for the vast majority of prints. Sometimes, settings need to be changed. I do not make any guarantees.

Did you know you can compare my presets with the default ones?

Well, kind of. Bambu Slicer has a “compare presets” feature which is really cool, see the button in the photo below. 

Please note, this will only compare my presets vs. the SoftFever version of the Bambu presets, and SoftFever has already changed a lot of things in his presets versus the stock Bambu presets that come with the non-SoftFever OEM Bambu Studio. However, you can also use this tool to compare different versions of my presets to see what I changed in each release!

Can I contribute?

Yes, please feel free to help the community out by doing before/after tests with these profiles, and leave comment on what settings work best for various types of models. Comments welcome, but please do not leave a bad rating just because the profiles did not work for a particular model you were printing. If you do not agree that a setting in the profiles is set correctly, or you think there is a better setting, feel free to leave a comment!

Recent Update:

10/07/2023 - Final Update Edition:

I have uploaded my last and final update to the profiles which contains many changes too numerous to list since the last update in June. Biggest changes are new filament profiles and calibrations.

Basically I am going to stop updating these profiles going forward because of changes in my life I no longer have free time. If anyone wants to remix this project and continue on the tradition, feel free to do so!

Older Updates:

06/25/2023 - June Massive Updates Edition:

I had extra time to dedicate this month to updating the profiles, so there are a massive amount of tweaks and changes I made. Please read the changes before downloading the update if these profiles are previously working great for you.

Printer Gcode Changes

• I am not longer using ThruTheFrame start gcode modifications to reduce motor current to make the motors cooler. I run my printer in a cool environment and the motors do not overheat on mine so I prefer the extra motor power.
• I am now using the Stacked Prime Line start gcode to make the prime line and calibration lines easier to remove from the plate. I love this!

Print Profile Changes

• I discovered that having the seam gap setting too low was causing some tolerance issues on small parts. I have raised the seam gap setting, and now the seams are slightly more visible, but still better than the default Bambu profile and with no tolerance issues.
• Seam type is now back to “Aligned” instead of “Back”. Although “Back" works much better on some models, for the majority Aligned has been giving me better results.
• Raised some speeds and lowered others for better print quality and slightly faster printing times than previous versions.
• Tweaked the line width settings for slightly better print quality and slightly faster printing times.
• Disabled the “precise walls” setting in OrcaSlicer. Despite it being called precise, I found that it truly is experimental and was causing tolerance issues on certain parts. 
• Changed top and bottom layers back to 3 (Bambu default) from 4. I found for 90% of prints the 3 top/bottom layers is enough and has slightly faster printing time. For some parts you may want to manually set this back to 4.
• Profiles now use Gyroid infill by default instead of my previous preference of Adaptive Cubic. I prefer the look of Gyroid, but it's not scalable like Adaptive Cubic so if you are printing large parts you now need to raise the infill % manually.
• Ironing settings were previously too aggressive on certain filament, now my ironing settings have been lowered a bit to be a little more closer to the default settings.
• Avoid crossing walls setting has been enabled for all profiles, not just PETG, in an effort to reduce some occasional stringing instead of having to completely dry all filament frequently. This slightly increases printing time, however it has been avoidance % limited to not increase printing times too much. If you don't ever have stringing issues, you can manually disable this.
• Although the “Transparent PETG” print profiles were producing great transparency due to the high heat and very slow printing speeds, I was sometimes getting clogging on some PETGs. To avoid this, I slightly raised the speeds and slightly lowered temperatures in an effort to combat this problem.

Filament Profile Changes

• Lowered “slow down for layer time” to 2 seconds, down from my previous 8 seconds and down from the Bambu default of 5 seconds. I have found for most prints this produces a much more even outer wall finish. If you are printing a very small model or a model with a lot of small features and overhangs, you may want to raise this back up to 8.
• Some of the filament profiles I have re-tuned for flow rate calibration, it varies from spool to spool and I have averaged it out now that I've had a larger sample size from the various manufacturers.
• Lowered the bed temperature for PETG on the PEI/Textured down to 65c. I was having a lot of problems sometimes removing PETG parts from the bed and this seems to help. If you have adhesion issues, you can raise this back up to 70c or 75c manually.
• Some of the filament profiles temperatures have been modified slightly.
• The “Transparent PETG” profiles were sometimes causing me clogging, I have tweaked these in an effort to eliminate that issue.
   

New Print Profiles

• TPU (heavily influenced by Adam L's TPU profile, I adjusted with some extra settings I prefer and tuned it a bit more for my exact filaments).

New Filament Profiles

• FusedMats Transparent PETG
• Ninjaflex TPU 85A (also influenced by Adam L's Ninjaflex profile and tuned for my filament)

05/21/2023 - Small Tweaks & Fuzzy Skin Edition:

• Machine GCODE is now using the latest version of the thrutheframe start gcode they released this month, this is now compatible to the new firmware on Bambu X1 printer.
• Tweaked the speeds a little bit on the PLA and PETG print profiles for better results and slightly faster printing.
• I wasn't happy with the fuzzy skin defaults so I changed the settings to make the fuzzy skin more fuzzy.
• I have adjusted the tree support distance to better support smaller overhangs with less chance of failure. The support settings now also default to “Tree Support - Manual”.
• The prime tower is now slightly smaller than the default prime tower, after testing I was able to reduce the size of this a little bit with no increased failure or quality difference.

03/27/2023 - Textured LiDAR & Support PLA Hotfix Editon:

• Previous version I added a new “support PLA” profile, but I was a little bit aggressive with the settings and it caused my own extruder to clog, lol. Sorry if anyone else had this issue. I have made the settings of this a bit better now and hopefully will not cause any clogging when switching from PLA to PETG and vice versa.
• I have added a new “Textured Lidar” PRINTER PROFILE for those of you that have one of the thekkiinng textured sheets, which they claim works with the LiDAR and has a sticker on it to trick the camera when it scans the sheet. To use this, you must select the “textured lidar” printer profile, and set the sheet type to “High Temp PEI” (not textured sheet) in OrcaSlicer. Basically, this will allow the printer to do the extra -0.04mm squish for the textured sheet while using the High Temp PEI profile which normally should not have the -0.04mm squish.
• Please note I cannot verify if the LiDAR really does work with thekkiinngg's textured sheet or not. They claim it does, but due to the closed-source nature and secrecy that Bambu enjoys, we still do not have any numerical output after a LiDAR calibration to see if it's really doing anything or if it's just snake oil.
• I have updated the printer start/end gcode to have the latest version of ThruTheFrame X1C gcode which he updated a few days ago. He made some really nice changes to the gcode but you will have to go to his printable pages if you want to know the differences.
• Please note, I did edit the ThruTheFrame gocde to remove the +0.03 height adjustment he added for smooth sheets. I did not agree that the first layer should printer heigher on the smooth sheets to reduce elephant foot, OrcaSlicer will already compensate for this.
• Added a new filament profile for Overture PLA Pro. Normally I do not use Overture because of the cardboard spools issue with AMS, but they had a color I needed that I couldn't find in Sunlu or eSun.

03/20/2023 - New Options & Support PLA Editon:

• I added a new filament profile I call “Support PLA” for use as support interface for PETG prints. Previously, you could just use any PLA profile for support interface with PETG prints, but I found what was happening was that after the extruder printed at the colder PLA temperatures, it wasn't heating up quickly enough when it moved back to the PETG and this was causing my PETG prints to become fragile in some areas. So now I have made a “Support PLA” filament profile which prints the PLA at closer to PETG settings. This is still a work in progress and more tuning may be needed.
• I have taken advantage of some of the new settings released with OrcaSlicer, such as support angle, to allow for better supports that are easier to remove.
• The flow ratio for Sunlu PETG profile is now changed from 0.99 to 0.913. The 0.99 flow ratio I calibrated to a roll of Sunlu PETG that was several months old. The newest batch I received of 3 spools were over-extruding and after doing several new flow calibrations, the new ones all average out to needing a 0.913 flow ratio. I am sad that Sunlu tolerance from batch to batch is off by so much. So I recommend doing your own flow calibrations for Sunlu filament.

03/17/2023 - Supports, Ironing, & Noise Edition:

• Tweaked the support settings to work better and be easier to remove. This will especially work better if you are using support interface material, but the settings will work for single material prints as well.
• After having done numerous ironing tests, I have settled on the best ironing flow rates and speeds for both PLA and PETG. Not all brands and colors of plastic will iron the same; so I have settled on the best settings that work for “most” materials.
• Added new filament profile for eSun PLA+. Like all of my filament profiles, I have done a temperature tower and flow rate calibration. Keep in mind not all spools of filament are the same, and different colors can print slightly different due to the dyes, I still recommend doing your own flow rate calibrations if you want perfection.
• I have removed the “engineering” profile from my presets folder; I found it to be wasted space. If you want strong prints, just increase the infill % and wall count yourself before slicing. The other small speed tweaks this profile had gave us minimal benefits.
• I have adjusted the chamber fan speeds to run a little bit slower and quiet the printer down, I have not found this to have any negative impact on my prints.

03/11/2023:

• Added new “PETG Transparent” print profile. This is meant to be used with those PETG translucent/transparent filaments, and with these settings they will print very clear. These print very slow and with no cooling, so be sure to use supports even if your print has small bridges and overhangs.
• Added filament profile for IEMAI transparent PETG filament, this is tuned for printing with no cooling and slow, see above. If you are using a different brand of transparent filament, you can duplicate this profile and do your own flow calibrations, just don't change the temperature or cooling settings. I use IEMAI because it's cheap, good quality, and available on Amazon Prime.
• Added new Silk PLA filament profile for Eryone Silk PLA filament. This is a work in progress and may need more tuning, but it should work good for now.
• Tuned the rest of the PETG profiles further for better quality after more testing was done.
• Some other very small, minor changes.

02/27/2023:

• Added new “engineering” profile, this is meant for PC/PA/ABS/PETG prints where strength and quality is desired at the expense of speed. For regular PETG prints, please use the PETG profile.
• Tuned bridge flow, bottom layer flow settings on PLA and PETG profiles.
• Slightly lowered the speeds on the PLA profiles for better quality with not much reduction in print time.
• Adjusted the infill settings on PLA and PETG profiles.

02/24/2023:

SoftFever fork added a lot of new changes to the slicer recently, I have updated the profiles to take advantage of some of these new settings. Some of these settings now allow for overhang slowdown when using Arachne engine, and also cleaner wall quality – so these are enabled by default in my profiles. I have also changed the brim separation for PETG prints from the default of 0.15 to 0.20 because I feel PETG brims stick a bit too much. Most recent download can be found in the download page. I am continuing to test different settings and making new profiles, so stay tuned for more filament profiles and more changes in the future.