Practical 3D Printing: Step 2: Slicing

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Step 2: Slicing

05.49

00:00	The final aluminium parts for this project will be produced by a third-party manufacturing service, meaning we don't need to complete the slicing process ourselves as the manufacturer will do all that work for us.
00:11	However, we are going to print some prototype parts on our SLA printer for some fitment checks so in this case we'll focus on this slicing for our prototype parts rather than the final parts.
00:23	So, let's dive straight in by dropping our STL mesh file into our slicing software.
00:28	So, in this case we're using Chitubox Basic and we've got the slicer already set up for our Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra printer.
00:36	We can also see that the part in this case is relatively large on the build platform.
00:42	So, what we're going to do here is have a bit of a play with the orientation like leaning the part over on an angle and then we're going to experiment with some supports and print times to find the best compromise.
00:53	Surface finish isn't overly critical here as they're just prototypes.
00:57	But it would be good to get the best results that look reasonable.
01:00	We should always angle the surface we want to look best away from the build platform as that means that we won't have any supports on it.
01:08	In this case it will be the top surface of these parts.
01:11	Remember, minimizing the build height is going to be the main way of reducing the print time.
01:17	So, let's just start by leaning the part over on an angle and we can do this with this rotate feature here.
01:23	And then we're just going to lean the part over like this and we can see the estimated printing time down the bottom here and we on this angle we can get it to about an hour 41.
01:36	If we look at it from the side we might be able to get a little bit more out of that.
01:41	Now, it's looking like about an hour 41 minutes is about the minimum for this part.
01:47	So, before locking that in let's just jump over to the next tab here which is our supports.
01:53	And straight away we can see that the print time has increased slightly.
01:56	As the part has been lifted slightly off the platform.
01:59	So, the orange areas here show us where the supports will be touching the part.
02:04	So, in this case they're touching the entire bottom mounting surface a little bit of the part here and the surface lower surface of the spigot as well.
02:13	If we generated some automatic supports and going with the medium setting in this case, we'll be able to see that the entire bottom surface is going to be covered in witness marks from the supports and therefore it'll be quite rough.
02:26	This is just a prototype though so the surface won't be visible or functional and we can easily sand it flat so it's not going to be a problem.
02:34	So, let's just continue with these medium default automatic support settings.
02:40	Any other orientation in this case if we for example rotated the part up, we just delete those supports, rotate the part up like this is going to significantly increase the print time and it would also result in supports on the surfaces of the part as well as inside the lattice structure which would be very difficult to remove.
03:02	It should also be noted in this case it's actually possible to fit both the mounts on and the estimated print time for this would be around two hours with a build orientation that still results in essentially the same supports.
03:15	While this might seem like the logical choice, we have no time pressure and all the extra surface area just means more release force on the release film.
03:24	So, to keep things simple, we'll just print each side individually.
03:28	So, moving on we can see that our cavity detector and collision detector look good so next we just need to apply the settings for our resin.
03:37	For this project we'll use some of Aligoo's standard resin.
03:41	It's more than adequate for these prototypes and unsurprisingly I've found it to be very trouble free and easy to use with the Aligoo printer.
03:49	This is actually in Chitubox's resin alliance feature but I already have a profile set up for it.
03:56	So, we can just navigate to the slice settings from here.
03:59	The main settings to note here are the 2.5 second exposure time, the bottom layer count of 5 and the bottom exposure time of 35 seconds.
04:09	If you're ever unsure of what these settings should be for your particular project and resin then it's best to run a calibration print with something like the XP2 validation matrix.
04:20	Everything else here is fairly standard so we can just apply this and then hit slice.
04:26	We can use the slider to view all our layers and we can also use the island detection function from here.
04:33	So, we'll just click start detect.
04:34	So, this has brought up a few islands in this case that could be from small unsupported areas or more likely some isolated pixels.
04:42	It's always important to review these as they can cause the print to fail.
04:46	In our case most of these islands do just appear to be isolated pixels so we can just select delete all islands up here.
04:54	So, with that we can send this directly to our printer using the network sending function here.
05:00	Selecting our printer and then clicking send and after we have our resin loaded into the printer we can just start the print.
05:07	We'll look at the printing process as well as cleaning and post curing in the next module before getting back to the manufacturing of our end-use aluminium parts.
05:15	So, to summarize this module we brought our mesh files into our slicing software and started by determining a suitable print orientation with minimal print time and compromises to the surface from supports.
05:27	Most slices have detection features that highlight possible issues so it's always good to review these.
05:34	Next, it's a matter of applying our print settings for our resin of choice based on the supplier's recommendations, previous experience with these products or running a calibration print.
05:44	Finally, we can slice the print, review the layers and send it to the printer for printing.