Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Printing the naked lady with Slice and Dice



After my experience trying to print the naked lady with Netfabb I decided to have a go at it with Slice and Dice.  I had considerable trouble getting the polymer flow right to bridge the base of the pundendum.  Once I got that right, I set up a shell print with zero infill.


The print went well with the exception of one delamination flaw in the left leg as you can see in this pic.  The lack of support that a light infill would have provided became apparent as I printed up to the top of the breasts and the area around the collar bones where considerable bridging was required.



Aside from that, however, Slice and Dice produced a superior print quality as you can see.





Very little of the z-axis juddering was apparent and the surface quality was superior.  Indeed you could even see the modeling of the body with triangular segments in places.

That was fun.  Now back to work.

4 comments:

Casainho said...

The power of the source ;-)

Nice to know that your own software tool, that you build/code yourself, gives better results than closed software from someone else :-)

Since you are sharing the code, later it can be integrated on Skeinforge or even someone learn with it and improve actual Skeinforge code... - I think we all win :-)

Forrest Higgs said...

That's the plan. The code is always available to anybody who wants it. I expect, though, that interested parties will be more likely to use particular methods or approaches rather than the whole thing, however, in other gcode generating programmes.

I wrote Slice and Dice primarily so that I would have a body of code that I could easily alter to handle unusual printing jobs. As I see it, Slice and Dice is a pure research tool rather than anything that would develop into a general purpose tool for just everybody.

Unknown said...

looks very good, i wonder how hard it would be to have it adjust infill on its own, so that it would only put infill where it was needed, and yet leave the center with little materal in it. my guess is that it would have to look at the 2 layers above and below and take that into account

Forrest Higgs said...

I made a start on that with the code module that adjusts the infill density when one approaches the top side of a particular part of a print.

Support, however, would have to look all the way down to the raft for the tops of the breasts and the neck. If I were to allow for support to spread at a 45 degree angle or thereabouts, I could, however, bring down the amount on infill dramatically.