im quite new to the 3d priunting world but am working with 3d software for the last 10 years or so and its a really cool experience to print 3d models that have been created
i have gathered a lot of ideas to improfe simlify 3d and was waiting on the new release to see if i can take some things off the list but i think none of my thing made it into the release so i will add here a collection of all the ideas ive come across during the last couple of weeks experimenting with simplify3d so you have some things to look at for your next planing phase
since its quite a bit i did not feel like putting them into single threads but if that is what you want i can do it over the next couple of weeks or so
- easy syncing profiles between systems
i use the software on a laptop and a desktop and synchronizing changes to the profiles was quite tedious since i always need to export the FFF to a cloud to then import them into the software on the other machine. what would be nice if one could define a default save location for the profiles (so one could choose a cloud synced folder like gdrive or dropbox) and when updating the profile it automatically saves it to the cloud synced folder. - live slicing tuning
for example tuning the infill, one needs to do slicing, then go out again open options change infill close options slice again, and then go to slice layer again to see if ok, rinse and repeat if not happy. i ended up doing this cycle a LOT i mean a LOT and it would be amazing if the change could be seen directly in the slicing. - firmware flashing
well what it says, ability to flash a new firmware to the printer. - click on filament line for detailed info (speed/type,..)
sometimes its hard to read from the color information what speed exactly the filament line has in the slicer at a specific point, so it would be amazing to be able to select a section and see some detailed information about the speed and other parameters that are present at the selected section of the line/layer - EEProm calibration
this needs to be done over the gcode console at the moment, a simple interface to set the parameters would be ncie since this is needed to do fine calibration of a printer. - show profile difference
when working with multiple profiles it would be nice to see the difference somewhere, not sure if this because im new to this and still experimenting a lot with different profiles for different tests but its hard to then compare the print result to the profile configuration without manually switching trough the profiles and all the settings. so a side by side thing or so would be really helpful in such a case. - remember slicing layer
so i have a sliced model and inspect the layers to see if everything will work out, but then in the middle of the model i see some problematic region that i want to tweak a little bit, so now i jump out of the preview mode to tweak the process settings for that layer. then i go back to the preview and have to search for the layer again. this needs in some cases be done multiple times and maybe for different regions/processes. so it would be nice to have the option to show the preview in the last "line range" that it was previously. - separate top layer speed and extrusion width setting like for the first layer setting
- disable slicing for hidden objects
i would expect that if a object is hidden in the model list that it is also not sliced, not sure what the idea behind the current concept is. to exclude it from the process each time one wants to only print a part of a series is a bit tedious and could be simplified by taking into account the visibility of a model. - relative layer amount depending on mm thickness
a layer option for top and bottom layer where one can say how thick in mm the top and/or bottom layer should be instead of layers. from my experience i always ended up calculating the layers with the layer height to get a reasonable thickness. - layer modifications start stop slicing depending on layer number
in this option it would be more useful to set the start/stop on a specific layer sicne the slicer operates on that number and when i used it i wanted it on a reference from the sliced preview.
which would also bring a other feature to mind that using mm for slicing in the preview in addition to layer/line - editable lines in preview mode
since the decision is done in the preview if a parameter is good, why not give the option to change it there? lets say i slice my model and then see that i want more toplayers or a different infill percentage, well its easy just select the feature type and get a menu where the parameters can be changed directly instead of exiting to edit the process settings. same could be done for speed. - profile handling really confusing
its nice that different settings can be stored into different profiles but without learning it one has no clue which values belong to a specific profile (im talking material and print quality) so why not have a faint color overlay on the values that belong to either of those to make it clear what is stored and what is changed when switching to a different profile - temperature auto tuning (PID)
a option to start the PID auto tuning process and store if when finished would be great as well.
happy printing!
