Skin without walls

[kfsone 5]

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

Edited September 15, 2021 by kfsone

[nallath 1,124]

I don't understand what your issue is. The area that you circled just has ironing moves over the walls. If you don't want that, disable ironing.

[kfsone 5]

7 hours ago, nallath said:

I don't understand what your issue is. The area that you circled just has ironing moves over the walls. If you don't want that, disable ironing.

 

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.

 

 

 

Edited September 15, 2021 by kfsone

[kfsone 5]

Ironing only fixes that for the top surface, tho, the bottom surfaces still look like this:

 

(and with flash)

[nallath 1,124]

Well, you could set the top-bottom pattern to be concentric. Changing it to zig-zag might also get what you want.

[Kvnper 1]

Hi Nallath, I think you're missing the point here.

 

I believe he is saying that the top and bottom surfaces will aesthetically look better if you could make the top and bottom surfaces have only one outer wall. Concentric produces a different aesthetic and, in my opinion, not as good. Concentric also introduces other issues such as small gaps between walls.

 

I believe prusa slicer allows one wall for too and bottom and I've seen some beautiful prints using it that people were selling.

[kfsone 5]

13 hours ago, nallath said:

Well, you could set the top-bottom pattern to be concentric. Changing it to zig-zag might also get what you want.

 

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.

 

Edited September 16, 2021 by kfsone

[kfsone 5]

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

 

[kfsone 5]

Concentric top/bottom, zig/zag top skin 72deg, concentric ironing,

vs

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

 

[kfsone 5]

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.

Edited September 17, 2021 by kfsone

[Kvnper 1]

Perhaps smartavionics would be more responsive to this feature

[nallath 1,124]

On 9/16/2021 at 9:12 PM, Kvnper said:

Hi Nallath, I think you're missing the point here.

 

I believe he is saying that the top and bottom surfaces will aesthetically look better if you could make the top and bottom surfaces have only one outer wall. Concentric produces a different aesthetic and, in my opinion, not as good. Concentric also introduces other issues such as small gaps between walls.

 

I believe prusa slicer allows one wall for too and bottom and I've seen some beautiful prints using it that people were selling.

Yep! I think I was. Sorry for the confusion! I also think that I do get the point right now.

You can get this to work with modifier meshes. I've attached a project that shows an example of this.


 

TopWalls.3mf