kfsone

I guess another alternative would be to break the purely circular path of the inner walls periodically with spars.

Working on a print which includes some spike-like protrusions, after printing, these easily break off unless I spend a lot of time carefully crafting tapers at the base, and even then the top of the taper tends to act as a most-likely shearing point. Further experimentation traces this down to the position of infill beneath the taper, e.g for this simple model: With infill reduced to 10% for exaggerated effect, you can see that in the single-spike version, the infil is nicely centered under the spike, but if the spikes are nicely centered on the infil, you can see that the taper is basically an unsuspended, non-infil'd void. I was thinking that what might help most here would be a bit of actual 3d shenaniganry, where instead of just sets of overlapping walls: We could introduce a sort of z-hop tie off: That is: It prints #1 and #2 as normal, it prints #3 but leaves a small gap, then it prints #4 as normal, but instead of starting #5, the 2nd-layer inner ring, it goes to the break, moves the head down half-a-layer, pushes material into the break in #3, then moves the head back to the layer 2 height. Move the head across xy to the start of the that 2nd layer middle ring, and start printing that ring. leaving out everything but the inner ring of layer 1 and the middle ring of layer 2: Although there would be no break between the link and the ring itself, the gap on the top layer here is just to distinguish the new movement. Is this something that could be done generally by the slicer, or is this something that would need an addon? TestSpike.stl TestSpike2.stl

Left it for a couple of hours, it just sat there, and then SoCal Edison solved the problem for me. Came back ok.

Just let my UM3 update its firmware to 5.3; saw it dl, saw it check, saw it take 2 minutes updating firmware, then it restarted itself, I saw the logo, screen went dark, dial lit up, flicked 3-4 times, and then went solid, and that was 40 minutes ago. Tried turning the dial, nothing happens.

Ultimaker 3, latest firmware, Cura 4.11, .4mm nozzle, Ultimaker Grey ABS, 225c / 65c, Layer Height .3, Initial .27, width: .35 or .4, Initial layer width: 100, 105, 110 and 120% Walls 3, Bottom layers 3, Printing at 220c, I can't seem to get my bottom surface to print smoothly, but I'm not sure what the result is telling me. I'm getting great adhesion, and the top layer looks exactly the same when I don't iron it. How can I make it look more like the top surface?

Even with these changes, although I'm not good enough with a camera to show it, the walls are always very distinctive, because the top-surface has portions that defeat the effect of each possible pattern at potentially blending the skin/walls. The closest I've gotten so far was after @kvnper mentioned Prusa slicer, using Archimedean spirals for ironing actually gets it pretty close. And this still only solves the top surface. Which brings me back to wanting to try and reduce walls (e.g to just 1) on the top and/or bottom surfaces. At least using monotonic lines gives it a vaguely "etchings" texture and, without the glaring wall contrast, that's not a terrible aesthetic.

Concentric top/bottom, zig/zag top skin 72deg, concentric ironing, vs Concentric top/bottom, zig/zag top skin 72 deg, no ironing

And corresponding first layers: printed this simultaneously on the same printer, so the differences are mostly just lighting effect here.

Same UM3, same spool, only settings changed were top/bottom and initial layer patterns, and top surface skin pattern, all changed to concentric. Top model: ironed (concentric, as per previous prints), bottom model: not ironed.

Ironing only fixes that for the top surface, tho, the bottom surfaces still look like this: (and with flash)

The issue is the visually distinct difference between the walls and skin on the printed object, which I was trying to solve with ironing when I took the screenshot. The top surface is one single layer, so I expected it to look smooth and clean, but instead the walls form a visual border around the skin. Printed on UM3 with Ultimaker ABS using default cura "Normal" profile with .3 layer height: (*1 the little round blemish highlighted in yellow is where the print finished) (*2 flash used for emphasis) vs same model, same printer, same material, ironing, manual hackery of the gcode, but I forgot to enable monotonic surfaces.

The addition of the monotonic feature really brought home to me how odd top/bottom surfaces end up looking because of the intrusion of walls into those surfaces. Consider the attached dolphin keyring. The contrast between the wall lines and the skin lines is quite severe. What I want is more like this: (using walls = 0) but no wall at all can produce some ugliness at the edges. This is only really noticeable when the top surface isn't a trivial square/circle, but when it's noticeable it really spoils the surface. Dauphin.stl

At some point the 2nd print head got out of level, so low that even by the 3rd-4th layer the right core can't extrude anything. I've tried removing it and reseating it, no help. Tried reseating the other core. So I started running manual and automatic levels. 2nd head is still too low. I have the 1st (left) print core levelled beautifully, giving me the best first layers since I got the machine. Am I missing something obvious? -Oliver -- Addendum Today it keeps trying to autolevel with the 2nd/right print core lowered, causing it to fail. I remounted both cores, manually levelled fine, and now it's doing this:

I tried to match as many settings between extruders as I could (I have to tell you *that* is tedious, it takes so long to switch between setting lists, if dual extrusion becomes popular, people are going to flee cura faster than you can say "do you think this extruder's settings will load any time this week?") In some of the previews it looked like the infill was aligned, but that could be coincidental 😞

@tinkergnome see my response a couple replies above, which has an example model pair. I tried messing with the per-model settings but there was nothing I found that produce settings equivalent to simply switching nozzles while rendering the parts of a the letters. I should note that unlike the simple X model, there's actually some other stuff on my original (a border, etc) that would preclude my simply changing nozzles at layer N 😞 Where do I find the "Merge Origins" option??? Lastly, I tried making the models not actually overlap and separated them by .1, .5, 1.0 and 1.1x layer height, all to no avail. I've carefully made as many of the non-material settings the same across the two nozzles as I could, but no effect.