Non-planar 3D printing has mostly been experimental, but PancakeSlicer could finally make more people interested in trying it out and find more ways to improve it and use it practically.
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Alpaca Engineering explains that every few months, a non-planar 3D printing demonstration goes viral, but is rarely adopted practically by most 3D printer owners. Most non-planar experiments are for research, with half-abandoned GitHub projects. He further explains that non-planar isn’t widely adopted not because there aren’t any general-purpose non-planar slicers, but because it’s not accessible and easily implemented in a familiar workflow, with 3D printer owners spoiled by modern workflows and not needing to manually run G-code directly from an SD card.
Watch On Commercially available 3D printers are also not optimized for non-planar 3D printing. The challenge with printing at various angles is the clearance angle needed to bring a print head up and down without crashing into its own print. The slicer uses 3D models of various print heads from different 3D printer models to know how to slice the object to avoid collisions, thus having limited support; but Alpaca Engineering has listed a large number of supported 3D printers from Bambu Lab, Prusa, Creality, Voron, and many others. The varying shapes of the print heads also mean different printers will have different capabilities, with some managing less angle and curvature than others.
Alpaca Engineering also has great animations and practical demonstrations of the different slicing algorithms in the slicer, including how the algorithm slices the object for non-planar printing. We highly suggest you watch the video if you’re interested, as his animations explain non-planar slicing intuitively.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/3d-printing-developer-creates-self-hostable-non-planar-printing-slicer-pancakeslicer-makes-non-planar-3d-printing-accessible-potentially-leading-to-rapid-community-development#main
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