PrusaSlicer 1.34.0

Slic3r Prusa Edition Slic3r 1.34.0 - Prusa Edition

Summary:

This is the Slic3r 1.34.0 - Prusa Edition release. This is an alpha release, bringing a significant performance boost to the slicing process and visualization.

When using this release of Slic3r with the Original Prusa i3 MK2 printer, following configuration files shall be used: github.com/prusa3d/Slic3r-settings ↗

Improvement of the slicing speed

Most of the time consuming slicing algorithms were parallelized using the Intel Thread Building Blocks ↗, also some time critical algorithms were fine tuned for performance. On a 4 core CPU, the improvements often provide a 3x to 4x speed boost compared to the previous Slic3r Prusa Edition release.

Improvements of a visualization speed

If available, this Slic3r release will use OpenGL 2.0 features, namely the Vertex Buffer Objects and OpenGL shaders. Contrary to the old Slic3r, the new Slic3r pushes the geometry data onto the GPU, thus significantly increasing rendering frame rate for complex scenes. This is noticeable for the 3D print path preview of complex finely sliced objects and the frame rate boost is radical on high performance graphics cards. On dual graphics card Windows laptops, the new Slic3r will advice an NVIDIA or AMD GPU driver to take over the rendering tasks.

Improvements of memory requirements of a 3D print path preview

The old Slic3r allocated 528 bytes of memory per print path segment for the 3D print path preview. This made the 3D print path usable for large models on high end computers only as the old Slic3r allocated up to 10GB of RAM for objects fitting a common 20x20x20cm build volume. This Slic3r release lowers the memory requirements to 160-232 bytes per print path segment by reducing redundancy in the 3D path preview geometry, requiring around 60% less RAM on average.

Other changes

This release contains following improvements:

• Significantly reduced loading times of the 3D print path preview.
• Rewrote the file IO layer from Perl to C++.
• Support generator has been extended to respect a minimum layer height value.
• "Reload from disk" command at the object popup menu, thanks to @alexrj.
• Cooling Buffer rewritten to C++, thanks to @alexrj.
• Generic modifier volumes, thanks to @lordofhyphens.
• Changed default infill pattern to Stars and an infill-perimeter overlap to 55% to match the defaults of @alexrj.

This release contains following bug fixes:

• Improved the speed of AMF import drastically. Fixed a scaling issue when loading an AMF file #7.
• Rotation and scaling did not support decimal values, based on work of @alexrj #41, #104.
• Improved "Seam position aligned" behavior #44.
• Fixed A large fractal pyramid takes ages to slice #117
• Fixed "Zero extrusion print moves and overlapping regions in first layer" #175 #184
• Reworked the variable layer height visualization to use OpenGL 2.0 shaders, fixing many issues #179.
• Fixed Window selections wrong #191, thanks to @uclaros.
• Fixed Slic3r ignoring "slow down if layer print time is below" setting alexrj#3515 thanks to @alexrj
• Fixed "When the Voronoi diagram contained very large coordinates" alexrj#3776, thanks to @alexrj.
• Support generator sometimes Base layers are trimmed by the briding bottom surfaces.

Prusa Research specific:

• On Windows, dropping an STL file over a slic3r.exe icon will open Slic3r and load the STL file #201.
• Windows builds were switched from Strawberry Perl to a homebrew perl distribution, compiled with Visual Studio 2013. This change made the debugging on Windows much easier, also it brought another 10% speed up to the slicing process. The build process is documented on Wiki ↗.
• Our Linux binary packages were missing some Perl modules needed for the OctoPrint discovery to work #36