Simplify3D User Forum

Perhaps this is already there somewhere and I haven't found it, but...

I would love to have a gap filling feature similar to the one in Slic3r (which is coincidentally broken in the latest version). This produces very accurate extrusion widths for filling gaps and is much faster than using 100% infill with a rectilinear or other pattern.

UPDATE: See the pictures below for what I mean here. I'd like to see dynamically-adjusted extrusion width to avoid all the zig-zagging during gap fill.

Are you talking about the options already in S3D for thin wall behavior? Just go to Advanced tab and look at the "Thin Wall Behavior" section. There's several options including gap fill.

I have that on. Slic3r seems to be able to vary the extrusion width a bit to avoid zigzagging back and forth, which is faster and smoother.

JoeJ wrote:Are you talking about the options already in S3D for thin wall behavior? Just go to Advanced tab and look at the "Thin Wall Behavior" section. There's several options including gap fill.

I think that what I am looking for is a feature that would allow S3D to automatically increase or decrease the extrusion width to fill gaps. Here is an example. This is what is generated by S3D for a part that I print fairly often:



And this is what Slic3r does:



The part produced by Slic3er prints more smoothly and more quickly, and suffers only because Slic3r lacks a couple of good anti-ooze features. Slic3r's gap fill is in this case superior.

I'll have to look at the Slic3r code, but what I'm thinking is that gap fill and/or solid infill should, below some threshold of extrusion width/nozzle size ratio, try to fill the gaps by adjusting the extrusion width.

BTW, the pics come from CraftWare, which doesn't appear to be a very good slicer engine (yet, anyway) but has the best G-code visualizer I have yet seen.

Bill _/)_

Bill:I selected Craftware as my slicer of choice a few months ago primarily becuase of it's excellent visualization capability. But I recently purchased Simplify3D due to the numerous bugs in Craftware 1.10 Beta that made it impossible to slice the parts I designed. Simplify3D is able to slice all my parts with no problem, so it has saved me a lot of time and frustration. I agree that Craftware's toolpath visualizer is the best currently available, and I still use it for viewing toolpaths that are particularly complex or tricky. But overall I am going to stick with SImplify3D for slicing and printing because it just works better.

+1 "ability to vary the extrusion width a bit to avoid zigzagging back and forth"

+1. Dynamic extrusion width. All that zigzaging only adds issues

+2 Something I do quite a bit.

+1

+1