I've been playing with multi-material prints for a few weeks now and thought I'd discuss a couple of issues I've seen.
It seems that when planning travel moves, slic3r doesn't take into account the material type much. You can see this in the video here: [
www.youtube.com] (you can see white lines internally through the red center).
The two main areas of concern/improvement I see are:
a) it doesn't retract or reroute when moving across material types without crossing an external perimeter. Even though these are internal tracks, they are visible when you use translucent filament types (as in the video) as well as on the bottom of the print (as white lines through the red on the bottom).
b) more critically, the travel moves which cross a external perimeter do not attempt to cross a perimeter of the same material rather than a different material. Crossing a perimeter from the outside to the inside usually leaves a small but quite visible artifact (especially with high contrasting materials) even when retraction is used. [By the way, I'm not talking about my tool changes movements here - where I do a Z-lift and wipe to avoid leaving an artifact - but just travel movement during printing of one the colors within a layer.]
Now I thought I found a Slic3r Github issue for the first one but I have not been able to relocate it again.
Does anyone know if either of these have been covered already?
My other wish list is that you can tell slic3r where to park/move a head for tool changes (e.g., for wiping, cooling - or parking as in my printer's case). [Either through the GUI directly or using custom tool change command hooks - if the latter is used then some intelligence is required in reading those changes and adjusting the travel path planning accordingly]
So I thought I'd at least raise the issues here for discussion before creating Github requests/issues.
Cheers,
Robert.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2013 09:42AM by buildrob.
