3 ms·
A bit of a tangent, but on your note amount multi-material being wasteful - you can improve that a lot by thinking ahead in your design and being strategic abou
by soneil 2y ago
A bit of a tangent, but on your note amount multi-material being wasteful - you can improve that a lot by thinking ahead in your design and being strategic about where you use colour.
Your benchy is almost a worst-case scenario (which is likely intentional) - because the coloured features are vertical, there will be several changes per printed layer. If you can constrain your material changes to layer boundaries you'll get a much better waste ratio.
A good example of this is printing coloured labels/features on a faceplate. So you print the whole faceplate in a single material, then switch material and print the highlight colour as raised features. That gets you a lot of result for a single material change. (On single-material printers there's a method where you strategically pause the print and swap the materials by hand. Learning lessons from that will really hammer home the mindset of optimising tool changes!)
There's a lot of lessons like this you'll pick up, where making your design sympathetic to the print process can have huge payoffs.
- Ambadassor 2y agoI agree, designing for 3D printing and more specifically designing for multi-color or multi-material can help save a lot of time and material. Additionally, printing any number of copies of the same multicolor object will result in the same amount of waste. This doesn't reduce the absolute amount of waste, just makes it a smaller % of the total material used. Also worth looking into the "wipe into object" setting in the slicer, which will use the color changes in an extra model instead of purging them.