Why don't you use Cura slicer?
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I've made an effort to familiarize myself with Slic3r, Slic3r PE, and Cura 3. I've found things I like from all of them, but I typically find myself returning to Slic3r PE for a couple reasons. I have not used Simplify 3D. I have briefly used Kisslicer and will probably get deeper into it soon.
1. Cura has no speed control for small perimeters like bolt holes so the quality of the holes is incredibly poor. It leaves gaps and drags the filament around the curve. This makes the holes weak. Slic3r knows to slow down and the hole quality is perfect.
2. Cura seems to lack control over bridging and overhang parameters. It would be nice if you could specify slower print speeds and higher fan speeds during overhangs and bridging. The Cura help site just recommends reorienting the part to avoid bridging or to use support material. Slic3r gives a fan setting for bridging operations and gives good results. It also treats the first layer over infill as bridging, which means I can get away with fewer top layers.
3. Slic3r has an ensure vertical thickness setting, which will find areas of the top surface that might need additional layers underneath them and will add some material in a gap fill pattern. Typically under curves surfaces. This ensures the top surfaces will properly fill. I often have gaps when I use Cura, and the solution given to me by Ultimaker is to just use more top layers and denser infill.
4. Cura seems to lack support for firmware retraction. It does give fine control over retraction settings, but those settings are then backed into the gcode.
5. Cura lacks an easy way to manage linear advance K factor values. Slic3r now has that built in per filament config.
6. Cura lacks variable layer height. It would appear that this is coming in the next release, so I look forward to that.
7. Cura won't let you have a brim and a skirt. In Slic3r I use the skirt to prime the nozzle and a brim to help minimize warping. Cura lets me use one or the other. True I could use a larger brim and accomplish both, but a simple circle around the model is all I need to prime and a single wall brim is enough to adhere.
8. Cura was not giving me dimensionally accurate parts. I printed 2 end pieces to fit on the end of a 2020 extrusion. 1 with Cura and 1 with Slic3r, using the same settings as far as I could tell. The Slic3r part fit on the extrusion perfectly, the Cura piece needed ample filing to fit at all. The slic3r bolt holes were properly sized, the cura holes needed to be drilled. Perhaps I needed to modify the extrusion modifier for cura? Is flow % the same thing? I tried changing the flow % in other prints, but would get gaps between walls at anything less than 100%.
There are many things I like about Cura though.
1. I find the settings tree in the new GUI to be easy to use. As a new user coming to version 3 the defaults were fine, and when I needed a feature I couldn't find it was easy enough to add. I spent some time going through the settings and added nearly everything, and as I found what I used often and used never I simply hid the settings I no longer needed. I prefer that to the seperate tabs and views that Slic3r uses. It's interesting to note that the 1.3 dev branch of SLic3r allows you to build a similar sidebar menu which Slic3r PE has not yet brought across.
2. The layer preview is nicer than Slic3r I find, but a little slower. I like that it will simulate the tool head path. I like that it allows you to hide different path types so you can look at just the infill, or just the shell. I do wish they would separate the inner and outer walls and top and bottom surfaces out as well. The layer slider is a little sensitive. I like that it shows travel moves.
3. I like how Cura allows you to use modified meshes to define separate print settings for different areas of the model. Though it's usage is a little esoteric. Slic3r has similar modifier meshes but I find them even harder to use. It would be nice if this was exposed more easily in the GUI. For a while I was using these meshes to overcome the limitations I mentioned above, but it was taking forever to prepare a model. It was simpler to just use Slic3r.
4. I like that Cura gives very detailed control over print speed, acceleration, and jerk settings, minus bridging and overhangs. I find I'm able to get generally better print quality with lower print times from Cura, minus the complaints above.
5. Cura seems to properly support vase mode. Slic3r is very hit or miss.
All in all I would like to use Cura more, except for the issues I mentioned above. For now, if it's a mechanical part, I use Slic3r. If it's a art piece, I use Cura.
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Hello Phaedrux, thanks for the extensive posting - all good stuff. BTW, I have just implemented adding settings to change the speed/flow/fan when printing bridges. Hopefully, that will mature and make it into a future release.
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Excellent. I hope Cura continues to improve. I have been impressed with the pace of development for version 3. I hope it keeps up.
Will those settings affect bridging only, or overhangs as well? It would be nice if overhangs got some special treatment. There are times when I'd like to print outer walls first, but overhang performance suffers. Either speed and fan controls, or the ability to specify outer walls first, except on overhang layers, would be nice. The support generator already can tell the angle of overhangs to support, so hopefully special rules for overhangs could be made?
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Just turn combing off, and then it won't drag the nozzle through the infill.
That did it thanks
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OK, I'll look into what it will take to be able to specify settings for overhangs. A relatively easy solution would be to use the bridge settings for walls whose overhang angle is less than some threshold. Would that be acceptable?
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1. Cura has no speed control for small perimeters like bolt holes so the quality of the holes is incredibly poor. It leaves gaps and drags the filament around the curve. This makes the holes weak. Slic3r knows to slow down and the hole quality is perfect.
3. Slic3r has an ensure vertical thickness setting, which will find areas of the top surface that might need additional layers underneath them and will add some material in a gap fill pattern. Typically under curves surfaces. This ensures the top surfaces will properly fill. I often have gaps when I use Cura, and the solution given to me by Ultimaker is to just use more top layers and denser infill.
6. Cura lacks variable layer height. It would appear that this is coming in the next release, so I look forward to that.
Variable layer height has now bee added, although it's automatic.
I too have noticed that I get gaps on curved surfaces. I think there is a setting to sure it but can't find where it is now.
I too would like to slow down automatically on small parameters
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One issue i've just noticed it curves don't play nice with pressure advance. Anyone else noticed a stuttering with it turned on?
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David can confirm but I think that the latest beta of RRF has some fix for pressure advance related to the smoothness of extrusion rates in curves.
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OK, I'll look into what it will take to be able to specify settings for overhangs. A relatively easy solution would be to use the bridge settings for walls whose overhang angle is less than some threshold. Would that be acceptable?
Yes I think that would work well. Overhangs and bridging are pretty similar in their requirements for slow speeds and lots of cooling so they stay in place. This one change alone would make Cura more usable for me.
One thing that Slic3r also has is an extrusion multiplier specifically for bridges, with the logic being that since you're extruding into thin air, you want a thinner extrudate so that it gets pulled taught, and there is less plastic, and therefore, less thermal mass so that it cools faster. I've found this very useful when printing with larger nozzle diameters.
I would also say that being able to look ahead and detect a bridge is about to begin and slowing down before leaving the edge of the supporting layer so that it has a chance to anchor itself. I notice that Slic3r will slow down a little too late and the extrudate will break or disconnect.
Also, I've just been looking into the variable layer height plugin and it looks really good. The manual GUI from Slic3r PE is a bit weird and fiddly to use. The 1.3 dev branch of Slic3r has an automatic function which obeys a full steps/mm value you specify which is a much better way to do it. I hope the Cura version is similar.
https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/20451-cura-variable-layer-heigth/ -
One thing that Slic3r also has is an extrusion multiplier specifically for bridges, with the logic being that since you're extruding into thin air, you want a thinner extrudate so that it gets pulled taught, and there is less plastic, and therefore, less thermal mass so that it cools faster. I've found this very useful when printing with larger nozzle diameters.
I would also say that being able to look ahead and detect a bridge is about to begin and slowing down before leaving the edge of the supporting layer so that it has a chance to anchor itself. I notice that Slic3r will slow down a little too late and the extrudate will break or disconnect.
Also, I've just been looking into the variable layer height plugin and it looks really good. The manual GUI from Slic3r PE is a bit weird and fiddly to use. The 1.3 dev branch of Slic3r has an automatic function which obeys a full steps/mm value you specify which is a much better way to do it. I hope the Cura version is similar.
https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/20451-cura-variable-layer-heigth/Yes, I have a bridge flow setting which does the same as the slic3r extrusion multiplier.
What I have implemented is that the bridged region of walls extends a little onto the solid regions that support the bridge so that the bridge settings come into action just before the air below starts and finish just after the next solid region is encountered.
I am not involved in the variable layer height stuff other than I made some small contribution to speed up their implementation.
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Your implementation sounds great. Can't wait to try it out.
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As far as the seg faults under linux go, I had another great one on a clean install. I want to add my K8400 dual nozzle. Can't.
I can add the single nozzle variant no problem. Try and add the second nozzle. Boom! Just dies.
Raised on it github. Discover it's an old bug that's still there after many months. Means it's impossible to add a dual nozzle printer. Again it's one of those annoying python gui issues that's causing it. So frustrating, both for users and the developers I imagine.
This is under the latest LTS version of Ubuntu.
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Here's an example of bridge settings being used in overhang regions. There is a setting to control how much overhang is needed to use the bridge settings rather than the normal settings.
The Cura devs are not very quick at testing/merging PRs so it will take quite a while before this (or similar) appears in a release.
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Here's a question - how do the other slicers handle the combination of bridges and support? Is bridging disabled when supports are in use?
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In Slic3r there is a checkbox toggle to ignore supporting bridges. Just like there is for support on build plate only.
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OK, thanks. Do you know what happens if both are enabled? WIll slic3r still print using bridge settings even when there is support below?
At the moment, my cura implementation has a switch to enable/disable the bridge settings (and, of course it has the on/off for the support as well) but if both the bridge settings and support are enabled, it will use both. It's actually quite a lot of effort (I think) to detect if an area has support under it so that the bridging can automatically be turned off so I wasn't going to do that.
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As far as I know, even with support turned on for bridges, it will still use the modified speed settings for the bridging sections. I'm not at my printer right now so I can't verify.
But I do have access to slic3r right now. I made a simple STL to test. https://www.tinkercad.com/things/gXWCAMR5SEE
It looks like for some reason even with support for bridging turned off it still adds a support for the outermost wall. I've never noticed that before. With Don't support bridges checked, and only on build plate unchecked, it will add supports on both outer walls, but not under the bridge. With only on build plate checked, it will add support for just the outer wall over the build plate.
It might be easiest to download Slic3r PE and see how it behaves rather than me describing it.
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As far as I know, even with support turned on for bridges, it will still use the modified speed settings for the bridging sections. I'm not at my printer right now so I can't verify.
But I do have access to slic3r right now. I made a simple STL to test. https://www.tinkercad.com/things/gXWCAMR5SEE
It looks like for some reason even with support for bridging turned off it still adds a support for the outermost wall. I've never noticed that before. With Don't support bridges checked, and only on build plate unchecked, it will add supports on both outer walls, but not under the bridge. With only on build plate checked, it will add support for just the outer wall over the build plate.
It might be easiest to download Slic3r PE and see how it behaves rather than me describing it.
Also, I should say that Slic3r may not be doing it the best way either. The only thing it had going for it in my books was cooling control during bridges and speed control for more corner cases.
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Cura is in my opinion slightly better than Simplify3d. The biggest problems are the lack of custom support placement and the lack of simple things like temp and fan settings per layer numbers. There is a ton of adjustments that could be replaced by simpler ones, especially what comes to cooling. At my customer I print mainly with UMs and there is no way to poke around with thw exported gcode afterwards to set these things like "turn the fan on 70% from layer a to b".
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+1 for custom support placement / removal in cura. Surely has to be the no. 1 feature request.
