Simplify3D User Forum

Hello People, i keep getting a issue where the program will hang when i press prepare to print, the progress bar either gets to "looking for overhangs" or " calculating infill" and will not move. sometimes it drops through within 10 to 12 seconds and creates the program paths... mostly i have to close it down and keep tying until it works it out.. it took me about 1 hour to get a output file last night so any advice will be very welcome. thanks wess

I can't say this has ever happened to me, but if I was you, I'd probably try slicing that same part with the default profile they include with the software. If that works fine, then you know it's one of the settings changes you made that's causing it. So then it's just trial and error to find the culprit.

I also experience Simplify 3D hanging once I ask it to prepare to Print (almost always on "Calculating infill...). Not all the time, but sometimes. I have success with default print settings, but then problems with my own settings necessary to get ABS to work. I have still not been able to identify which settings are causing the problems. any tips or hints would certainly help!

No fun wasting hours trying incremental changes to try to get the program to not hang!

I'm finally through hours of testing and have found that changing one setting in particular seems to cause the program to hang and/or crash:

the "default" settings do not cause the program to hang, and I can even use almost ALL my preferred settings for ABS printing until I make the number of dense support layers non-zero. This single change seems to cause Simplify 3D to hang almost every time (I have succeeded in printing some parts with some dense support layers, but it was many months ago and may have been with a prior version of Simplify 3D).

So I went back to the default settings (which never cause a problem when asking to prepare to print) and asked for 3 dense support layers. As it calculated, it took an abnormally long time to get through - I almost thought the program had hung ... but it finally produced a print preview. However immediately thereafter, I got a popup that said,

"Simplify3D.exe has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Please close the program."

So there definitely seems to be a glitch with the dense support layers setting... at least with me (3.1.0 running on Windows 7).

Your on Win7, which version, 32 or 64bit? What is the PC or laptop? What CPU, how much memory? This could be a resources issue.
You could start task manager and go to the performance tab then start the slicer and see what happens there as it tries to slice it. If memory usage and or CPU usage is maxing out then that could be a clue.

Also make sure other programs are not running and taking resources.

Just some thoughts.

I am observing the same problem, especially with more complex models. The moment I enable dense supports (i.e. set >0) simplify hangs either in the infill or calculating overhangs stage. With simpler models I can still see a considerable change in slicing speed with or without dense supports. I can also see that when it hangs, simplify drastically drops CPU usage.

Im running on a Macbook Pro (OSX 10.11.6) (2.6GHz i7) with 16GB of RAM. I can also observe the issue on my PC Win10 x64 (4.6GHz i7, 64GB of Ram). There seems to be no difference in slicing speed with dense supports enabled between both machines, whereas with dense supports disabled I see a considerable difference (esp. with complex models). On both machines I'm running Simplify3D 3.1.0.

I can confirm this is an Issue on 3.1, especially in complicated prints with multiple overhangs, I'm running Mac OSX 10.11.6 and I've replicated the error in win7 and win10.

Just to add a data point. This also happens to me. Just hangs at "Calculating infill..."... A very simple model. Infill is set to 0% so no idea what is going on.

You should probably make a new thread and include your factory file. This one wasn't even for the current version.

Just wanted to add a note to mention that these issues should all be resolved now in the latest 4.0.1 release. This included many bug fixes and performance improvements to help address these issues. There were several other reported cases where slicing would take longer than intended at a specific step, but these all work correctly now with version 4.0.1.

You can download the latest release by logging into your account on the Simplify3D website.

Thank you for your help reporting the issues!