Shrink RATE , should be added to filament properties

[S3D-Jake]

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1. What methods can be used to have various settings overrode and set by machine, quality, or material.
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Machine specific settings are those found in the base profile and not also in the quality, material, or extruder autoconfigure settings.
Placing a specific setting into all of the quality, material, or extruder autoconfigure settings will allow you to set specific values for that setting under each of those selected autoconfigures.

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2. Information about what things can break those carefully curated profiles from working as expected. Once settings have been "moved" to other areas in the XML file, does changing an associated setting in the GUI simply change the value, or does it also change it's position in the XML, thus reverting to the default S3D functionality for that setting? I have seen some posts indicate that it shouldn't break anything, but I've also seen other posts that indicate once a setting is modified manually in the FFF it should not be modified in the GUI.
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• Placing a setting from a nested "controller" such as the extruder controllers, temperature controllers, or fan speed arrays by itself into an autoconfigure will not function properly, as the entire controller should be added to the autoconfigure rather than just the individual setting.
• Adding a setting to material and quality, or material and extruders, or quality and extruders would result in undesired behavior. What you want to do is pick Material, Quality, or Extruders and add your setting to all of those types. No combining of different types.
• You can modify settings in the GUI after they've been modified outside of S3D. The main thing that gets tricky is that when adding a single setting to a material or a quality you want to also add a default value for the other options in that same type. So if you were to add <startingGcode> tags to the PLA autoconfigure you would also need to add it to the other materials. This will allow for the starting gcode to be altered on a per material basis instead of having a base setting for <startingGcode> and then after PLA is switched to, it overwrites the base material setting and now all materials use the same starting code as PLA no matter which one you switch to.

[Omikron]

What you want to do is pick Material, Quality, or Extruders and add your setting to all of those types. No combining of different types.

1. Can you clarify what you mean here? Does the setting need to live in Material AND Quality AND Extruders, or ONLY one of those?
2. Are we talking about moving settings or moving entire controllers such as extruder controllers or temperature controllers?
3. If a setting is moved to another controller (hopefully I'm using the terminology correctly) does it need to also be moved for all other settings for the whole printer or profile?
4. Once settings are defined where/how we want them, what happens when a new material or printer is added via the GUI? Does it use the S3D default behavior or the newly-defined behavior?

[S3D-Jake]

What you want to do is pick Material, Quality, or Extruders and add your setting to all of those types. No combining of different types.

1. Can you clarify what you mean here? Does the setting need to live in Material AND Quality AND Extruders, or ONLY one of those?
2. Are we talking about moving settings or moving entire controllers such as extruder controllers or temperature controllers?
3. If a setting is moved to another controller (hopefully I'm using the terminology correctly) does it need to also be moved for all other settings for the whole printer or profile?
4. Once settings are defined where/how we want them, what happens when a new material or printer is added via the GUI? Does it use the S3D default behavior or the newly-defined behavior?

1. Certainly happy to clarify. If you're choosing to add a setting to Material, it needs to be added to each material section, not just the section of, for example, PLA.

2. I'm talking about moving individual settings that are normally found in a controller. That has un desired effects. If a setting in the base profile area is found in a controller it should only be added to the autoconfigure sections as part of a controller.

3. A setting that is found in a "controller" (Extruder Controller, Temperature controller, etc...) should not be moved to another controller. Moving extruder settings to a temperature controller and vice versa wouldn't really even make sense. Perhaps I'm not clear on what you're asking here.

4. When done correctly, the software will notice a new setting being added to the material, quality, or extruder autoconfigure sections and will add that setting when new configurations are added from the buttons in the GUI.

[Omikron]

I consider myself an advanced user

3. Regarding the horizontal size compensation, is there a way to input a percentage? Inputting a value in mm is not helpful considering different models will have different values here.

If your model shrinks by let's say 3% horizontal size compensation won't fix that, that's not really what it's there for.

Example:
Shrink_1.JPG


Assumed shrink by 3%:
Shrink_2.JPG

To get the holes (48.5mm diameter) up to their original size you'd need to use a negative value. But this will also further reduce
the outer dimensions of the part (164.9mm wide).

And even if this would work somehow - it wouldn't fix the two holes now being too close to each other (97mm instead of 100mm).

It doesn't seem clear to me what the mechanics of horizontal size compensation are then. My assumption was that it would scale the whole object enough to compensate for the size difference. In such a cases, wouldn't the holes and their relative distances scale as well?

[Omikron]

What you want to do is pick Material, Quality, or Extruders and add your setting to all of those types. No combining of different types.

1. Can you clarify what you mean here? Does the setting need to live in Material AND Quality AND Extruders, or ONLY one of those?
2. Are we talking about moving settings or moving entire controllers such as extruder controllers or temperature controllers?
3. If a setting is moved to another controller (hopefully I'm using the terminology correctly) does it need to also be moved for all other settings for the whole printer or profile?
4. Once settings are defined where/how we want them, what happens when a new material or printer is added via the GUI? Does it use the S3D default behavior or the newly-defined behavior?

1. Certainly happy to clarify. If you're choosing to add a setting to Material, it needs to be added to each material section, not just the section of, for example, PLA.

2. I'm talking about moving individual settings that are normally found in a controller. That has un desired effects. If a setting in the base profile area is found in a controller it should only be added to the autoconfigure sections as part of a controller.

3. A setting that is found in a "controller" (Extruder Controller, Temperature controller, etc...) should not be moved to another controller. Moving extruder settings to a temperature controller and vice versa wouldn't really even make sense. Perhaps I'm not clear on what you're asking here.

4. When done correctly, the software will notice a new setting being added to the material, quality, or extruder autoconfigure sections and will add that setting when new configurations are added from the buttons in the GUI.

So using these methods is it possible to add settings such as retraction length to material-specific autoconfigure?

[parallyze]

It doesn't seem clear to me what the mechanics of horizontal size compensation are then. My assumption was that it would scale the whole object enough to compensate for the size difference. In such a cases, wouldn't the holes and their relative distances scale as well?

It changes the outlines, just like the tooltip says

Looking at the object from the previous post right from the top:

Positive values will expand the outlines, negative values will inset them.

Here's extreme values (-10mm/10mm):

It's easy to see how it does not affect hole distance. It's not a scaling function. This can be used to fine tune dimensional accuracy.

Imagine over-extrusion on purpose. The thicker perimeters would make all printed objects a bit bigger than they are on the outside
and holes would end up smaller than they should.

[Omikron]

parallyze, thanks for the detailed reply, it was helpful and appreciated.

While the operation was obvious to you, the tooltip description is not as obvious for everyone. Having worked with other slicers that do handle true whole-object shrinking in settings (and not on a per-object basis), I assumed that the feature in S3D would also shrink/expand the object appropriately in order to make the adjustment work.

S3D's use of the word "shrink" in the tooltip is also misleading as there is no shrinking happening. It's either adding or removing outlines. It's not shrinking anything.

I've manually adjusted for shrinkage values before by adjusting the object size on the plate, but I've lost count of the number of times I've forgotten to apply the setting after removing and re-adding an object.

This is 100% a feature that belongs in autoconfigure options for filament.

[S3D-Jake]

So using these methods is it possible to add settings such as retraction length to material-specific autoconfigure?

Yes. In the case of retraction length you would need to place the extruder controller into the material autoconfigure settings. So you would then have all the settings under the extruder controller umbrella as a function of material. (A lot of our dual extruder machine profiles are already configured this way)

[parallyze]

S3D's use of the word "shrink" in the tooltip is also misleading as there is no shrinking happening. It's either adding or removing outlines. It's not shrinking anything.

There's no outlines added or removed. Actually the tooltip says:
"A negative value will inset (shrink) your model outline in the XY plane. Useful to account for small dimensional differences in print quality. Set zero to disable."

And that's exactly what's happening:

Two parts, two processes. Very low tolerances between inner/outer part (0.001mm).

Inner part scaled to 95% along X/Y. Even moving the part won't fix the different distances to the outer part all around.

Process for the inner part set to a compensation of -1.0mm. The outline of the part is now smaller, distance to the outer part is now the same all around. If not inset/shrink, how'd you call it? Expand/Contract like in Photoshop?

I've manually adjusted for shrinkage values before by adjusting the object size on the plate, but I've lost count of the number of times I've forgotten to apply the setting after removing and re-adding an object.

This might be fixed if they finally add a "reload"-feature which has been requested for some time now...

[parallyze]

While the operation was obvious to you, the tooltip description is not as obvious for everyone. Having worked with other slicers that do handle true whole-object shrinking in settings (and not on a per-object basis), I assumed that the feature in S3D would also shrink/expand the object appropriately in order to make the adjustment work.

Just curious, which Slicers do support such a compensation? Shrink rate depends on many factors so I wonder if there's really a "one value fits every object using this material"-value...

In Slic3r/PrusaSlicer it's called "XY Size Compensation", works exactly the same like in S3D and it's tooltip says:
"The object will be grown/shrunk in the XY plane by the configured value"

Cura 4 -> "Horizontal Expansion" -> "Amount of offset applied to all polygons":

Edit:
Cura 4.6 seems to have an additional "Hole size compensation"-feature.