Simplify3D User Forum

Since purchasing S3D I've printed 4 or 5 parts, one was s tri colour part that it did a great job on, the other were just single colour and I found S3D wouldn't slice properly and showed evidence of problems with the model, yet when I try them in Slic3r they worked without any problems.

Tried all the model repair tools and they didn't work, tried following https://www.simplify3d.com/support/tuto ... sh-errors/ without success either

Of these 'failed' parts, one was generated myself in Designspark, and I thought to be fairly simple rectilinear box and the others were downloaded from the manufacturer of my printer and were intended to be spare parts for my printer, ie it they should be well tried and tested models

It seams to me that Slic3r is actually a lot more tolerant of 'imperfections' in models, or that S3d just has it tolerances wound down too far.

Depends on your models. If they are water-tight, and have features that are not smaller than your unit can print, they should slice. If not, see above.

Maybe I should of added that having worked in Engineering, plastic injection mold making and 3D CAD over the past 25 years I actually have a pretty good handle on the vagaries of STL files. so my question isn't why do models fail because the answer is usually always down to the STL mesh.

My question is why is Slic3r better, and what has to be done to S3D to make it as good as Slic3r in this respect..... isn't there someone embarrassed that a free package is outperforming S3D?

......and I found S3D wouldn't slice properly and showed evidence of problems with the model.

Any chance of elaborating on this statement. It's almost impossible for anyone to offer any comments or advise without you doing so.

The slicing would show bridges across cavities, sometimes there would be strange surface layers in the middle of the bodies where I would expect there to be only fill structure, mostly typical slicing failures that I associate to a 'not watertight' flaw in the STL..... but rather than fix the STL its just easier to do the job in Slic3r.... fortunately I've not yet had a job that doesn't work in S3D and slicer cont do well enough.

Unfortunately we are living in the world where the quality of STL files is very hit-n-miss, and always has been, and the standard 'its not watertight' argument is often not good enough. We once had similar issues with milling CAM software, eventually the solution was for the CAM software to improve its tolerance for crappy STL quality and for users like myself to avoid STL wherever possible.

You can try some of the files yourself, many of these files have issues in S3D yet work fine in Slic3r

https://github.com/reprappro/Mendel-3