PrusaSlicer 2.1.0-alpha1

PrusaSlicer 2.1.0-alpha1

PrusaSlicer PrusaSlicer 2.1.0-alpha1

Summary

This is the first alpha release of PrusaSlicer 2.1.0, introducing a state of the art Undo / Redo concept, custom print bed model with lower GPU memory requirements, perspective camera, layer height table with modifier parameters, SLA printing with the pad around the object, wipe tower improvements, partial arrangement, color change time estimates, scale to fit the platform and much more.

To let you enjoy the alpha without worries, the alpha builds save their profiles into PrusaSlicer-alpha directory, so you may use the alpha side by side with the current release without ruining your production configuration.

Undo / Redo #1024

We took our time to implement the Undo / Redo functionality. First, if we had implemented it earlier, we would have to struggle with the Perl programming language bindings, and we would waste a lot of time later on porting that new code into C++. Second, Undo / Redo is hard to do right, and we took our time to implement a robust and future proof framework. We believe we have the best Undo / Redo implementation in the world of FFF and SLA desktop printing software.

All the actions accessible from the Plater are now undoable including object selection, actions at the side bar (adding modifiers, changing their attributes), with the exception of switching the print, filament, SLA material or printer profiles. Changing the parameters at the Print / Filament / SLA Material or Printer parameter tab is already undoable with the "Reset to system value" and "Reset to user saved value" buttons, therefore we decided to not put the events of modifying these parameters onto the Undo / Redo stack of the plater.

One can jump over multiple snapshots by clicking on the Undo or Redo button with the right mouse button. As each of the snapshots have an expressive name assigned, it is easy to orient oneself even in a long list of actions. Undo list

The Undo / Redo stack currently limits its memory usage to 10% of the physical RAM size, and the oldest Undo snapshots are released until the memory limit is met. As we are only storing differences between the successive Undo / Redo snapshots, the Undo / Redo history is nearly limitless on a modern computer. The Undo / Redo memory statistics is now shown by the System Info dialog.

Some of the PrusaSlicer functionality depends on the active printer technology (FDM or SLA), therefore the active technology is remembered at the time the Undo / Redo snapshot is taken, and the Printer profile is switched to the last active Printer profile of that particular technology when that snapshot is reactivated.

Custom print bed, lower GPU memory consumption & faster start up

PrusaSlicer now supports custom print bed textures and models #1875 #2169 #2496. Both PNG and SVG formats are supported for the print bed texture. The image and model files are assigned to the Printer profile from the "Bed Shape" dialog, and the full path to these files is stored into "bedcustomtexture" and "bedcustommodel" Print profile variables. We are considering to install the custom bed textures and models into user's PrusaSlicer configuration folder, so that we would store the names of these files without a full path to make sharing the Printer profiles easier.

We received multiple reports of graphics issues due to the excessively detailed print bed textures not fitting into the GPU memory #2299 #2382. We implemented two strategies to cope with the low GPU memory issues:

• We only rasterize the print bed texture to a high resolution of 8192x8192 pixels if the graphics card supports OpenGL 3.0 and newer, or if there is a Retina display connected to a Mac. Otherwise a lower resolution 4096x4096 print bed texture is rasterized.
• The print bed texture is compressed with this library ↗.

In addition, we improved application start up time and the time to switch the Printer profiles by sending a low resolution print bed texture to the GPU first, while the higher resolutions are compressed and sent to the CPU progressively as they are ready.

Layers editing #1804 #2102 #2347 #2421 #2529 #2587

The Slic3r PE used to offer a layer height table, where one was able to set the layer height per object Z span. While we removed this feature from PrusaSlicer 2.0 due to developer time constraints, we are now bringing the feature back with major improvements: One can now not only define a layer height for a Z span, but one can also apply any parameter to the Z span of an object, that can be assigned to object's modifier mesh. When editing the Z minimum or maximum value of a Z span, the top and bottom planes are visualized at the selected object in the 3D scene.

The new feature was mentioned by the "Modeling" with PrusaSlicer? ↗ video.

SLA zero object elevation with pad around the object

In PrusaSlicer 2.0 the SLA supports require a certain elevation of the model if supports are to be generated. This ensures that the support pillars do not collide with the model and the pad can also be generated without complications. In the 2.1 release we added a feature to set the elevation to zero and the supports and pad will be correctly derived for every model. The generated pad will surround the object with small break-stick connections. The pictures below show the old behavior (left side) vs the new feature (right side).