Types of travel lines?

[jazzychad 1]

I am wondering what the different colors of travel lines represent when viewing "Layer View > Line Type"

There are Light Blue/Lavender lines and Dark Blue lines.

 

I am guessing one is a retraction move, and one is a normal travel move. Which is which?

(I have a guess, but I am seeing some odd behavior with Combing set to "No Skin" and no retractions happening at all in the skin layers...)

 

[jazzychad 1]

Now that the print is done I can show you what I mean. I have Combing set to "No Skin" but no retraction is occurring and I get these travel lines (I do have retraction enabled)

 

Here are is the Line Type layer view for the top layer

 

Here is the finished print

[jazzychad 1]

@smartavionics I saw you posted something related in another thread about No Skin combing being troublesome.. is this what you were seeing as well?

[burtoogle 513]

Hi @jazzychad. Yes, this is exactly the problem I mentioned. They call it "no skin" combing but the way it was implemented it was doing "infill combing", i.e. combing within regions of infill but not combing everywhere else. I have submitted a change (PR) so that the no skin combing will comb in regions of infill and also within the walls. That fixes the problem you are seeing because it will no longer travel across a wall without a retraction which it has been doing quite happily before now.

[jazzychad 1]

Thanks @smartavionics, that makes sense. I have found the PR (#781) and will try it out from source. Hope it gets merged!

[burtoogle 513]

OK @jazzychad, if you try it please post a screen shot of the layer view so we can see what it has done for the travel routing. If you print it, please carefully inspect the printed output to see if there are any artifacts caused by those travel moves that go along the walls. The nozzle will be close to the edge of the print so it could cause some roughness on the walls. On my own testing I have seen zero roughness due to the nozzle being so close to the edge but I am interested to get feedback from others.

[jazzychad 1]

Will do @smartavionics .. back to my original question, which lines in the layer view mean a retraction will happen? (or, if the colors don't indicate that, is there a way to visually inspect when a retraction will happen before actually printing?)

[burtoogle 513]

The light blue indicate travel with retraction, the dark blue without retraction. Unfortunately, the layer view doesn't show any z-hop so I use other gcode viewers when I want to get a detailed look at what's been produced. The one I normally use is the CraftWare slicer which has the best gcode viewer I have come across so far.

[jazzychad 1]

Argh, I build the CuraEngine from source and I am getting this error when slicing... (I am using latest 3.3.1 Cura frontend app on macos... do I need to build a more recent one from source?)

 

2018-05-27 00:57:09,557 - DEBUG - [Thread-23] UM.Backend.Backend._backendLog [90]: [Backend] [ERROR] Trying to retrieve unregistered setting with no value given: 'support_wall_count'
2018-05-27 00:57:09,557 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._onBackendQuit [765]: Backend quit with return code 255. Resetting process and socket.
2018-05-27 00:57:10,528 - INFO - [MainThread] UM.Backend.Backend._onSocketError [201]: Backend crashed or closed.
2018-05-27 00:57:10,530 - DEBUG - [MainThread] UM.Backend.Backend._createSocket [213]: Previous socket existed. Closing that first.
2018-05-27 00:57:10,532 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._terminate [276]: Attempting to kill the engine process

 

[burtoogle 513]

What's happened there is that the master branch CuraEngine is trying to retrieve a setting value that is not being provided by the front end. You can probably get away with simply replacing the fdmprinter.def.json in your Cura installation with the one that is in the master branch.

[jazzychad 1]

That's what I thought. Luckily I had just tried that, and it worked! Here is what I've found for this particular print with your fix branch (I can't print the model again until tomorrow, so this will have to do for now):

Pre-fix (latest master):

 

Post-fix (your branch):

 

I will try this print again tomorrow with your branch... looks promising!

[burtoogle 513]

Not sure that's totally as expected, can you post a project file so I can take a closer look?

[jazzychad 1]

Looks like there may be a few cross-wall travels, but not exactly sure... I'm attaching the STL files here in case you want to play with them also.

MuniFaceplate Dual Color - Faceplate.stl

MuniFaceplate Dual Color.stl

[jazzychad 1]

And if you want to see the actual CAD project, here is the Onshape link:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/4899a3f9c6be77ec2f1168ab/w/2cb57853ef162ccce58c4fce/e/0f13698b1078e5af565662e3

Must get some sleep now.. thanks for all the help so far!

[burtoogle 513]

I sliced one of those STLs and the travels were correct although for some of the moves it went a very long way around the perimeter so it could be better to turn off the combing completely. The time difference between combing no skin and no combing at all is very small. Personally, I think I would just turn the combing off for that print. Cheers!