I meant to do this pool weeks before… however, I’ve been bussy fighting with non enclosed ABS big prints and wrapping…
what slicer do you recommend?
I’ve used all of the mentioned and started to develop a taste for craftware… however, i sort of don’t like that i have to specify the printer bed size every single time.
Cura seems too user friendly for my taste… but it does a good job… specially with the custom json for my printer.
slic3r… haven’t dial inn too much in it but the interface is ok…
I’ve been using Cura for a long time and recently tried tuning Slic3r. Cura’s still my primary, with Slic3r as a backup when Cura does a poor job. I haven’t yet figured out how to get good Cura-like top surfaces from Slic3r; probably has to do with the fat track width it uses by default.
Slic3r’s lack of cool head lift (or “orbit”) kills it when printing fine detail like the tip of a small cone. It lacks a print time estimate, too (unforgivable in 2016!), which makes it impossible to tune time-for-quality settings on the fly. However, I love all the extra settings that allow for things like (theoretically) finer bridge tuning and asymmetric top/bottom layer counts. The toolpath preview is much better since you can see the toolpath. Saving profiles for print and filament separately is lovely, though overall the UI is hard to navigate and I get lost trying to find common settings, even if I just touched them 30 seconds ago.
Cura (15.02 for delta support) is fast, easy to use, has a clean print plate view, and exposes all the settings I routinely tweak on just two tabs. Conveniences like the button that saves directly to SD and then lets me unmount the card inside the software are time savers. However, sometimes it picks maddening toolpaths that jump around when filling even simple shapes like circles and rectangles, which can destroy first-layer and track-adjacent adhesion, harm bridging, and leave scars on (otherwise good) top surfaces. I recently had a small part (imagine a filament clip) that Slic3r tackled gracefully, where Cura wanted to drop little dabs of plastic and draw an outline that didn’t stick. Cura’s version required a raft and had a much dirtier surface from jumping around between layers.
Thanks @Tim_Visible for your reply…
Honestly, I have less than 15 days 3d printing… and i’ve using cura 2.1 and craftware 1.4 mainly.
slic3r is fine… but i’ve started to notice that cura and slic3r are giving me better prints… maybe is a matter or dial it in… who knows
tried cura 2.3… and I have to say it is a nice update/upgrade… It slice fast which is what i was looking for… and since cura is the most voted slicer i think i’ll stick to it until i find a limiting factor.
I wonder if you could send me the stl file for the clip you mentioned and test.
well
my concern is/was that im having different results with diferent slicers… and I’de made sure all settings was the same (within my possibilities) all across.
I really like craftware because is fast and i can configure a lot of things.
Cura (on advanced mode) is sort off the same; but i’m having big issues making it run on my linux machine (as well as craftware as i’m running a pure 64 bits distro) so im running slic3r here.
anyways… i’m sticking to cura and slic3r until i get enough saved to get simplify3d… everyone is recommending it.
