Suggestions for near perfection!

[pwolfe1011]

I have used Cura and more often Slic3r for my printing needs until a few weeks ago. I just happened to have a $150 laying around and took the plunge. I waited a long time to purchase S3d because I had a hard time justifying the cost for something that open source does for free, although not so well sometimes. I'm not good with explaining my ideas so I think the best way to start wording my thoughts is to list the pros and cons that I have personally observed and experienced between these three slicers.

Cura:

Pros's - Prints details well (better than slic3r), fast slicing, easy to use interface (even the expert settings are straight forward), nice preview display of your model, time and material amount display ( I run with really slow accel rates which always adds time to the prints compared to the predicted time)

Con's - Limited print speed options when compared to Slic3r and S3d, very slim options for infill and exterior layer patterns, Had trouble getting it to connect directly to my printer, some odd ball support placement, Can't adjust extrusion flow for bridging.

Slic3r:

Pro's - Extremely adjustable setting for everything, able to save profiles for print settings and filament settings separately, would slice some things that Cura would not, diverse selection of infill and external patterns (if you set 3 solid layers for top and bottom they will print as rectiliner and the very outside would print as the pattern you select, makes sense to me).

Con's - oh boy...My biggest complaint is this thing loves to freeze up so you can restart it and go through all your settings again. I found that I could turn off background processing which would stop the freezing but then anything other than your normal preview won't work. If you switched back on the background processing, it would not "refresh" and start the pre slicing to provide you with a 3d detailed preview. Anyways, very slow slicing, very slow saving to sd card ( even with background processing turned on), creates some crazy pathways that just don't make sense sometimes, hard to learn all the setting (especially with the short duration of their pop up tips) takes for ever to set up a print that is drastically different from your last because of all the settings, default settings would not turn off my bed heater after print is finished ( I added some gcode to correct this), overall it has kind of a unfinished or basic looking interface.

S3D:

Pro's - It works, (I did change a few settings from default to better suit my printer and filament), instantly started having more consistent and better looking sidewalls of my prints, nice interface (I don't feel as easy to use as Cura, but this has more settings and capabilities), super (blink and you miss it) slicing, lots of new tools that i'm new to ( the virtual playback before or during print) the direct control of printer which helps calibrating 10 fold, manual support placement, and more i'm either forgetting or haven't used yet) very nice and detailed preview, overall nice and professional.

Con's - very disappointing lack of exterior layer fill patterns, some kind of design bug that will leave holes and gaps in the fill patterns ( I increased overlap to 75 % which helped but did not eliminate, and caused some parts of the print that printed good before to overlap too much), can't use brim and skirt separately (or I just don't know how to set it up, I want to be able to use brim to help with adhesion to the bed with a skirt as tall as my part for layer separation combat on abs) easier to use than slic3r, but some of the lingo is different and I have to re learn what some things do,

I believe to make S3d the perfect slicer, for me atleast, I see only one fix, but a couple additions.

1. Fix the leaving voids in the exterior fill of the print. I remember reading a tool tip for a feature in Cura that allowed Cura to kinda overtravel into say a tight corner, where the lines are only a couple degrees apart for example. While doing the overtravel into the space smaller than the extrusion width, I think Cura was computing how and when to lower the extrusion amount as to not overfill. I think Slic3r does this too because I've never had a "void" problem with it. I never read a tooltip about it though.
2. I would be most happy if more infill/fill patterns where provided. So far my favorite that looks the best on most of my non art objects it the "Archimedian Cord" from Slic3r. It really looks slick, especially when printing directly on a glass bed.
3. I would be very happy if I was able to use brim and skirt with their own separate settings. (But I would be more happy about the infill patterns)

I apologize for the long post.

Thank you for your time,

Phillip

[cquinn]

I have a similar experience to Phillip. I've used Slic3r for a long time (with Repetier Mac) for my first printers, then recently got a TAZ 5 and began using the Lulzbot Cura since that had the profiles builtin. I recently purchased S3D since I read good things about it, and have only made one print with it so far but played with the UI a bit more.

One thing that I liked about Slic3r was the ability to organize settings around what they set. Printer profiles for each printer: dimensions, extruders, gcode, etc. Filament profiles for each filament type: diameter, temperatures, cooling. And then the Print settings to control the aesthetic details of the print: all the rest, like perimeters, infill, support, etc. This helps to keep all the files organized.

MatterControl has a nice settings model as well with its distinct printer definitions plus Quality and Material presets layered on top.

With S3D I am having trouble getting my head around the relationship between the groupings of settings: Profiles and auto-configures for Material and Print Quality. For example, it seems that the Material auto-configure can only affect settings in the Temperature and Cooling tabs, while Quality auto-configure affects tabs: Layer, Additions, Infill, Support. And the rest go with the profile as a whole. But the UI does a poor job of showing this relationship.

So it seems that the auto-configures are completely contained within a Profile which would typically be setup for each given printer. How then do people share or reuse groups of settings between printers? Or manage multiple dimensions of quality settings? And where are these Profiles saved on Disk so that I can share them between my two computers?

And, how does S3D know what printer to plate on when there is no process defined? And then what is it actually showing in the General Options > Machine dialog in that case? That is, how can specific printer details be a general app option?

Also, I'm finding the modal dialog for editing the processes combined with the modal change to "Prepare to Print!" to be pretty tedious. Cura's modeless settings panel and background slicing are much nicer to work with with less mousing and clicking.

Sorry to rant: I do find the general UI polish of S3D to be much better than all the free apps. And building a powerful and yet usable UX for managing all the different settings is certainly no easy task.

[CompoundCarl]

FYI - if you want to save a profile to the hard drive, just go to File > Export FFF Profile

[pwolfe1011]

Cquinn, I have noticed some of what you are talking about. I have just this week experimented with three different filaments that I have never used before, (Taulman) pctpe, alloy 910, and T-glase. I noticed when switching between profiles that the filament diameter never changed automatically. I guess its assumed that whenever a profile is changed, you will be completing a new calibration. What if your simply going back to a roll of somthing that you dont used much but yet have dialed in your settings on previous runs? It is a minor inconvenience that im willing to bear with the trade off that my slices print more reliably. My only true complaint it the sparse infills that leaves voids at narrow corners and lack of exterior fill patterns. With the voids, it seems like S3d is thinking...ok, i have a rectangle that has a 1 mm wide gap that needs infill. Im going to send the hot end to make two fill passes and just leave the .2 mm gap because its smaller than the nozzle size of .4 and extrusion width of .4 that he stated in the parameters. If he would have simply installed a .2mm nozzle, I would have filled that in for him. I just dont feel like it today, even if he says he wants the infill to overlap the perimeters 75%. I was going for constructive humor there.