"Skin expand" feature needs a redesign

[lance-greene 7]

I like the idea of skin expand, but in use it is not very good, it does its job of expanding skins so you don't get little holes around the edges of features, but the fact that you can only expand X distance is where the issue is. because different prints use different amounts of infill, your skin expand is generally expanding out into a void and then returning,and doing that multiple times on top of itself, so you get those edges lifting up as they are so thin they cant be cooled properly, and then you have these raised lips that the nozzle constantly snags on and can ruin a print.

So here's an idea. could a feature be added so that instead of "expand skin x mm into part" it actually just expands into the next infill line? then as soon as it hits that line it can turn back, and you wouldn't have to worry about any edges lifting cause they would be attached to the infill line. plus before it goes to start doing the expanded skins, it could print a "wall" which would really just be a couple lines directly on top of the infill lines that the skin will be expanding into, so that way when the skin expands directly up to that line, it can merge into that wall that was printed to give you a nice smooth transition and no lifted edges.

[burtoogle 515]

Hi, as the creator of the skin expand feature I am interested to read your comments. Personally, I have never suffered the problem you describe but that doesn't mean to say that I don't believe that it occurs. Perhaps I don't see it because I only use thick layers (200um or greater).

Anyway, as to your suggestion I don't think it is very easy to determine where the infill lines are located so that you can stop the skin immediately above the infill line below. I'm not saying it's impossible to do but it's not trivial to implement.

As to having a wall to butt the skin into, I thought that Cura had recently introduced exactly that. There's a setting called "extra skin wall count". If you set that to 1 does it do what you desire?

[lance-greene 7]

Hey thanks for the reply,

i just checked out that extra skin wall count and that is exactly what i was talking about haha. Although it isn't perfect as it looks like it basically gives the entire part an extra wall (which could be bad if you only want 1 wall on your part) rather than only specifically giving an extra wall anywhere skin expand is used. also if the skin expand doesnt produce a straight line (like using it on a circle for example) then that extra wall is basically completely unsupported while being printed, which wont help the expanded skins much.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Guest