Skinning

I thought some of you might be interested in something I've been tinkering with. I really like the look of objects printed with a very fine layer height, however they take an age to print. I decided it would be great if I could 'Skin' an object by printing the outer layers with a very fine layer height but leave the inner layers with a thicker layer height.

I've been working on some simple scripts that take a GCode file and post-process it to create the skin effect. So far the results have been very encouraging.

The picture attached shows a 0.25mm sliced cube from Skeinforge (printed in 21m 30s) on the right. On the left is a 0.5mm sliced cube, post processed to skin it at 0.25mm (printed in 16m 0s). For reference the original 0.5mm cube without modification printed in 10m 0s. I've also just finished printing a 0.4mm carved object skinned at 0.2mm.

The quality is not quite there, but my script doesn't do much other than scale down the 0.5mm extrusion values at the moment. Now I know that this approach has merit I'll continue to work on refining the scripts with an aim to see if I can turn them into a Skeinforge plug-in to make it part of the toolchain.

There are more details on my blog here.

Regards,

James

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Check out my blog: AdventuresIn3-DPrinting

looks great! This could be a useful feature in skeinforge

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Someone already made a patch to Skeinforge that does exactly this.
e.g. Outer layers 0.25 mm, inner layers 0.50mm.
His initial prints looked very promising.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Nice bit of work, James.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

The toughest thing is always to do something new, when you succeeded everyone thinks that that's the way things should be. I think you done a superb job, keep going!!!!

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Cheapest PLA on the net Supply3DPLA.com

Thanks for the comments. I've posted some new pictures on my blog. Testing is going well, I'm going to work on some trickier prints to see how those go.

Regards,

James

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Check out my blog: AdventuresIn3-DPrinting

After reading your blogg I get more and more intrigued with what you do!!!!
Very nice stuff, will come in very handy.

You should definitely publish your articles/blogg much more!!! I will gladly
help you if you want any help.

Feel free to contact me at my e-mail if that would interest you at all info@swcab.nu
I collect knowhow on my site Supply3DPLA.com and you have amazing amount
of it on your blogg. I can also publish it on my old electronics page www.swcab.nu
with 9-11 million visitors / year.... I am sure they would love to read you blogg and
I also think there might be more people that could be curious enough to join us 3D
printing people :-)

Regards and respect
Bosse // Gorz

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Cheapest PLA on the net Supply3DPLA.com