KISSlicer

[menno 0]

Have you guys checked out this new slicer?

The slice speed in this software is extremely fast, so worth checking!

http://www.kisslicer.com/

Im curious what your experience are, please leave a comment?

[glasswalker 0]

Hey, I'm one of the beta testers for KISSlicer. I also should be receiving my Ultimaker today or tomorrow. Once I have it I'll be doing some testing on the Ultimaker with KISS.

I can say it's a damn good slicer, it's extremely fast, and has some very nice features. And Jonathan is constantly improving it and adding new features based on community recommendations.

From my experience using it on both a BFB 3D Touch and my RepRap (using Marlin Firmware) I can say it produces much better prints than Slic3r did or than Axon (Skeinforge) for BFB. It's faster than Slic3r by a fair bit, and WAY faster than Axon/skeinforge. (like seconds instead of hours kind of faster). One thing I prefer it for is that it's far better at compensating for extrusion width (I believe that's "Stretch" on skeinforge). Something that Slic3r has done a poor job of for me, and Axon has had issues with as well (ie: if I design a hole to be 3mm diameter, KISS prints it 3mm diameter)

Anyway, I definitely think it's worth a look, I'm happy with it. (though I've yet to use netfabb to see how it compares there).

I'll post more once I've got the Ultimaker printing with it.

[Daid 306]

The GUI looks like someone puked blue on your screen

But seeing the slice path results, I see some very distinct differences between Slic3r Skeinforge and KISSlicer. Which could provide some better results on thin parts.

Closed source is a big downer for me. I'll stick with SkeinPyPy (for obvious reasons)

[glasswalker 0]

The gui isn't the most pretty thing out there, but the focus is on usability (also it's partly due to the gui lib he's using I think)

Honestly I don't care what it looks like as long as it does the job well

Never used SkeinPyPy, but for me the slicing time of skeinforge was a downer. I do some fairly large complex prints, and slicing on skeinforge was literally taking me 2+ hours to slice prints. On Slic3r it would slice those same prints in 5-6 minutes. And KISSlicer could slice them in like 10 seconds. (seriously, it's THAT fast) lol

And the print quality out of the box (with minimal "tweaking") was far higher. Sure Skeinforge can get damn good prints if you spend eternity tweaking it, but KISS was getting much better prints out of the gate, with room to improve with minor tweaking along the way.

I'll be happy to post up some side by side comparison shots of the same STL done in several slicer apps once my Ultimaker arrives. (any suggestions for slicing apps and/or STL files to test?) Since I'm new to the Ultimaker, it will be an interesting test to set each slicer up and do a test print with it (to show it's "out of the box" factor) lol

[Daid 306]

SkeinPyPy is 4-5x faster then Skeinforge. It has a much simpler GUI (even simpler then KISSlicer I think) and the defaults produce really good prints on the Ultimaker. SkeinPyPy also helps you in upgrading your firmware to Marlin, checking your machine, and calibrating the "M92 Exxx" value (steps per E)

Comparison would be really good! SkeinPyPy also has a few tweaks on top of Skeinforge, which should produce better prints then possible with Skeinforge.

SkeinPyPy looks like:

Instead of "number of lines" and "line width" you configure the "wall thickness", which makes more sense really, but can confuse people that are used to the "old" way of configuring things. As I'm not working on the Slicer itself, but on the GUI, I try to improve usability with each version. The plan is that Slic3r could also be used as a backend. And other slicers that provide a "command line" interface. But currently it only slices with it's special SkeinPyPy backend (based on Skeinforge)

I also did a slice speed compared to Slic3r. Which is always faster, but not by a huge leap if the model gets complex:

https://github.com/daid/SkeinPyPy/wiki/Speed-comparison

(done with the same settings where possible).

[glasswalker 0]

That looks pretty good. I'll try it out once the Ultimaker is here... It didn't show up today unfortunately (sad panda...) anyway, I'll try a side by side print test.

Also I'd be happy to run a speed test with those models. Can you share your settings you used? (so I can approximate them with KISS, it likely won't be "the same" but I can approximate the same resolution/settings). I know in my side by side tests with Slic3r earlier I was seeing 5-10x improvement in speed over slic3r. Mind you at those speeds, it's really not even important anymore lol, unless your talking about slicing on minimal hardware (KISS is fast and efficient enough that it could run directly on embedded hardware, which opens some interesting opportunities lol, it's written purely in C/C++ so it can port to damn near anything relatively well)

Like I said your UI looks good. One thing to think of is KISS does have a full commandline interface. Allowing you to do batch slicing jobs purely from the commandline. You could talk to Jonathan about integrating it with your UI as another backend option. He'd likely be happy to help work with you to integrate it.

[Daid 306]

I used the pure defaults for SkeinPyPy.

And the following settings for Slic3r:

 

--nozzle-diameter 0.4--print-center 100,100--z-offset 0--gcode-flavor reprap--filament-diameter 2.89--extrusion-multiplier 1.00--temperature 0--travel-speed 150--perimeter-speed 50--small-perimeter-speed 50--infill-speed 50--solid-infill-speed 50--bridge-speed 50--bottom-layer-speed-ratio 0.5--layer-height 0.2--first-layer-height-ratio 1.0--infill-every-layers 1--perimeters 2--solid-layers 3--fill-density 0.2--fill-angle 45--fill-pattern rectilinear--solid-fill-pattern rectilinear--retract-length 0--retract-speed 30--retract-restart-extra 0--retract-before-travel 5--retract-lift 0--cooling--min-fan-speed 100--max-fan-speed 100--bridge-fan-speed 100--fan-below-layer-time 20--slowdown-below-layer-time 10--min-print-speed 10--disable-fan-first-layers 0--fan-always-on--skirts 1--skirt-distance 6--skirt-height 1--scale 1.0--rotate 0--duplicate-x 1--duplicate-y 1--duplicate-distance 6

 

A commandline interface in KISSlicer sounds good. I couldn't start it because of a missing library on my Linux machine. But I also have a ton of GUI ideas that I still want to implement... so much work.

[scottmayson 0]

Can someone give a simple answer to how we would account for different nozzle sizes in kisslicer? I have a 0.4, 0.5, 0.6 and 1mm nozzles and using 3 and 1.75mm filament.

Cheers

Scott

[alaris2 1]

Can someone give a simple answer to how we would account for different nozzle sizes in kisslicer? I have a 0.4, 0.5, 0.6 and 1mm nozzles and using 3 and 1.75mm filament.

Cheers

Scott

set the extrusion width to the nozzle size?

it's listed under 'style' for some unknown reason.

[alaris2 1]

Unfortunately, having tested slic 3r, Cura and k'slice at regular intervals, and having just done the same tests on the new Cura and new k'slice...

k'slicer is still the winner.

the GUI sucks really badly, as does the name, but the capability still kicks the rocks off all the other slicers.

sad to say, the new UI re-arrangement is actually less usable than the previous version, but the g-code produced seems to be identical from tests so far, so whilst I haven't seen the changelog, I'm assuming it's UI changes only.

for new users, the weapon of choice should be Cura still. it's slow and surface quality isn't as good, but the UI and ease of use make up for this. keep up the good work Daid.

[ian 32]

can some one post some ultimaker user profiles for kissclicer please ?

Thanks.

Ian

[fuchs 0]

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ultimaker/LETIq-3q-jg ? :-)