PrusaSlicer with multiple materials
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I have a tool changing printer with a number of print heads. I have run across something really odd and I suspect I do not understand the UI properly (PrusaSlicer 2.6.0). Specifically, in the 'plater' tab, on the right side there is a listing for print settings, the various extruders the filaments loaded in them and which printer is being used. I set extruder 1 to be PLA and extruder 2 is 'Flex' .... all good ....
At this point, when I click on the 'filament' tab I might select lets say an ABS filament that I want to edit the settings on. It's got nothing to do with the current job I am working on, I just remembered that I needed to change the build plate temperature and decided to do it now before I forget again. If I then go to the plater tab, the first filament as seen on the right hand side has changed from PETG (which it was originally) to the ABS profile. I don't understand why this is.
The model that happens to be loaded is using extruder 2 (Flex) and stays that way. Why does the filament change for extruder 1 as soon as I select a different filament to edit with the 'filament' tab?
Although not tested, I can see me having 4 different filaments loaded and specified on the right hand side of the 'plater' tab but as soon as I edit any one of the different filaments, my selected filament for extruder 1 is replaced .... WTF ????
I have been going under the assumption that what is about to be sliced and printed is using the settings as shown on the right side of the 'plater' tab - is this not correct?
I have also been assuming that when I edit print settings, filament settings and printer settings that these changes are reflected in the profiles but that PrusaSlicer still uses whichever extruders were specified in the currently selected 'Print Settings' field and uses whatever filaments I have set up in the lines right under 'print settings' on the right side of the 'plater' tab. Why does this get changed? Why, if I happen to edit the settings for the third extruder, does PrusaSlicer erase what I have selected as the loaded filament in extruder 1 and puts in whatever I just edited ?
What am I missing here ?????
Does this mean that if I change any setting anywhere, I then have to go to the plater tab and correct or re-select everything I had set up?PS.: my digging on the internet seems to suggest that this has been this way for quite a while. I am thinking if this was a bug, they would have fixed this very obvious problem. This is why I am thinking that I just don't know what I am doing and am trying to learn ....
Edit: Did some further testing and it seems that anything I change in the main tabs is reflected in what is shown in the list on the right side of the plater tab. I can see the logic of that but just don't see why the selected filament for extruder 1 is changed. Why not just leave it if your selected method of the UI isn't compatible with multi extruder printers?
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@jens55 When I used to do multi material or multi colour prints, I never did fathom the "logic" that Prusa slicer used so I disabled everything and did what I wanted using my own "pre-print" and tool change macros. I think it all stems from the fact that the slicer is primarily designed to work with Prusa machines which have their own (often strange) way of doing things.
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@deckingman, thanks! I thought that maybe I was just too dumb to get it.
Having said that, for reasons unknown to me, everything seems to be working now .... <shrug>
I did just discover something that I had not noticed before that could have screwed me up - there is an 'extruder' box in the filament tab, to the right of the filament name and about half way across the page. As I said, I never noticed that before and if I specify the correct extruder number there, it will in fact operate the way I had originally expected things to work.To sum it up, yeah, I was too dumb. My excuse is that the manual was never written ..... yup, that's my excuse and I am sticking to that ..
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@jens55 You and me both! I think it would be better if Prusa adopted the idea of "tools" rather than referring to tools as extruders. It's especially confusing with mult-input hot ends with multiple extruders feeding into a single nozzle. Prusa slicer has no understanding of this concept.
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Turns out I have a second excuse (backup excuse ?) ...... the field that specifies the extruder does not show up (not empty, it just isn't there) until you change something in the filament setting. This is very bad UI design and the kind of thing that has unfortunately been done on a number of settings in PrusaSlicer. There are several other areas where, unless you know the secret handshake, you will never know that the option/choice exists. Once the user figures it out, it seems at least somewhat obvious but that doesn't help a new user. A manual would solve a lot of these issues but it is still poor UI design. I am just ever so grateful that people on this forum have helped me in the past to decode these secret handshakes. It has improved my Prusalicer experience by a vast amount!
I think the design team is conflicted about showing that an option exist because it would clutter up the screen with too much information. I don't have a magic answer for this problem but in this particular case, not showing the data entry box on the screen until there is a reason to do so (when data was changed) is an unfortunate choice. I have looked over that screen many times and not seen the entry box. After a while your brain starts to ignore that area and you will not notice that something has change.d unless it really screams at you (a pop up box telling you that an entry has to be made ?) I am just glad that this kind of thing is not carried through on the vast majority of entry fields in PS.
Having said all that, I can't blame the design team for not hiring a professional UI designer when the product is given away for free.
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@jens55 I somewhat disagree with you on the last item. Prusa pays a dev team to develop the slicer, but neglected the UX for a long time, giving rise to partially proprietary forks like OrcaSlicer.
Also, PrusaSlicer already has an affordance where users can decide how many knobs to show with the simple/advanced/experts setting. And expert should show just everything.
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@oliof, I totally agree with you that 'expert' should show everything. Alas, it doesn't. Maybe there should be a fourth option called 'show everything'
I did not know that there was a paid dev team but based on what I see, a UI specialist was not part of the team. Generally, developers or programmers are not known for good UI design (or writing user manuals) -
I seem to recal that Prusa initially used Slic3R - the latest release of which was in 2018. All they have done is take the initial open source project and adapted it to their own needs. They deserve some credit for making their version available to everyone but on the other hand, I would say they have a moral obligation to do so, given that it is based on an open source project. One can still download Slic3R but as I mentioned earlier, the latest release is from 2018. Maybe Prusa recruited one or more of the Slic3R people? - that's purely conjecture on my part but it would explain why there have been no further releases of Slic3R for the last 5 years.
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@deckingman they did not hire the slic3r dev but choked the upstream project with their high change rate. Thats why its basically dead. Experimental stuff is independently done in superslicer, but thats for the most part a single developer project with a somewhat erratic pace.
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@oliof It's also some interesting stuff happening in OrcaSlicer, but they're somewhat shitting the bed since It's not fully open source with using the bambulabs library etc.
From the looka of it SuperSlicer has become somewhat dead in the water after Merill became sick last year. The latest nighty release being built on a rathee early alpha release of PrusaSlicer makes it quite obselete in it's current state imo.
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@Exerqtor, didn't know that there was OrcaSlicer ... sounds interesting and I will give it a try.
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@jens55 Give it a look, but other than the Bambulabs AMS unit it's pretty much useless for multimaterial in what I've looked at it.
I was mainly refering to the other stuff it brings to the table in my previous post, buliding on the calibration prints, UI and a couple other features.
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@Exerqtor, turns out that was a big fail. Besides the fact that I had a number of error warnings as orcaslicer started up, I did not see a way to set up my Jubilee printer. There was a generic Klipper printer and a generic Marlin printer as custom printers, no RRF based generic printer. I decided to set up a Creality printer just to see where that got me but I found no way to specify the number of extruders.
While it is likely that I just don't know what I am doing, I think I will stick with what I got. Still, interesting .... -
@jens55 sorry for digging this out so late... but if it helps: Prusaslicer is a Slic3r fork and still heavily relies on the Slic3r code even if it has a lot of enhancements now... and it carried over the behaviour "setting in selection dropdown on right side of plate = setting in selection dropdown on material/print setting/printer tab" from there.
For a single extruder printer (which is what Slic3r was made for - back in 2011, multi extruder 3D printers for the audience Slic3r was intended for simply did not exist) this is a very logical choice, since you
- choose the settings you want for your print job and
- then edit them as required for the current job.
Usually you would not like to have to select the appropriate setting once more for the second step - and if you are used to work like that (i.e. prepare settings, save them, then sometime later add your model, select settings and only do the editing you require for the current job) the behaviour is still prefectly fine. Thus, this has nothing to do with Prusa machines as deckingman had suspected
With the current Prusaslicer 2.7, I guess this logic has become a bit more obvious again since they added a second dropdown to the material settings where you can choose the extruder (and thus, the previously selected material setting) you want to work on. Personally, I would have preferred if they placed that dropdown to the far left of the material tab to keep the "left to right" logic of the GUI there... but well, their resources are limited and I guess it was easier that way.
