PrusaSlicer 2.4.0-beta1

PrusaSlicer PrusaSlicer 2.4.0-beta1

Summary

This is the first beta release of PrusaSlicer 2.4.0, following 2.4.0-alpha1 ↗, 2.4.0-alpha2 ↗ and 2.4.0-alpha3 ↗. This beta mostly fixes bugs found in alpha3. For new features in the 2.4.0 series, please read the release logs of the 2.4.0 alphas.

To let you enjoy the beta without worries, the beta builds save their profiles into PrusaSlicer-beta directory, so you may use the beta side by side with the current release without ruining your production configuration. If upgrading from any of the PrusaSlicer 2.4.0 alpha release, you may consider to rename your PrusaSlicer-alpha directory to PrusaSlicer-beta.

Send system info

In order to focus our future effort, we decided to optionally collect some general information about the systems PrusaSlicer is commonly executed on. Such system information will help us to deprecate support of obsolete platforms in order to concentrate on up to date hardware and operating systems to reduce maintenance cost, improve PrusaSlicer performance and to bring up new features. Please help us by submitting your system configuration to us, otherwise it may happen that we will deprecate support of some old or not so common systems too early.

The system configuration data collected is strictly anonymous and the full content of the data collected is available to the user for review from the new "Send system info" dialog. A unique system identifier is generated for the machine submitting the system configuration to identify duplicate records submitted multiple times by the same machine. The unique system identifier is anonymized by hashing with MD5 and salted with a "salt", which is unique to the "system info" service. We believe our method is sufficiently anonymous, however we are certainly open to suggestions by the security experts.

When connected to internet, a dedicated dialog will open on application start up (or second application startup, if Configuration Wizard is opened on first start-up), showing exactly what information PrusaSlicer collects. When confirmed, the data is sent to our server using a secure channel (SSL) and the dialog no more shows up at the following application start-ups. No other data than those presented by the "Send system info" dialog are submitted, and it is not possible to trace one's identity based on the data submitted. One can of course decline to submit the system information data.

FDM support improvements with respect to PrusaSlicer 2.4.0-alpha3

FDM supports were improved significantly in PrusaSlicer 2.4.0 alphas. In beta1, the FDM supports were improved further.

A conventional FDM support generator generates support towers based on the differences between successive object layers and PrusaSlicer's support generator is not different. Such a local algorithm often either produces excessive supports, or it does not support long thin features at all. While we are working on a smarter algorithm that takes global geometry of an object into account, it will take us some time to make it ship shape. In the meantime, we made some adjustments to the current local algorithm.

Namely, the FDM support generator algorithm was designed before introduction of the support blockers / enforcers and paint-on supports, thus it tried to be smart about not introducing too much supports while not missing supports below thin features, however such algorithm behaved unintuitively. Thus in this release, we switched off some of the unintuitive filtering steps and we rather rely on the user giving hints to the support generator using the support blockers / enforcers and paint-on supports.

We are still fine tuning our print profiles for the new "snug" supports. The "snug" supports behave differently than the old "grid" supports. You may want to experiment with different gaps between object and support interfaces, also the "snug" supports may require more interface layers than the "grid" supports to produce wide enough regions to be printable FDM technology.

• Disabled enhancement of thin long overhangs to be supported. The enhancement produced supports at object corners, which were difficult to explain #3094.
• Disabled filtering step that removed support towers in case the support contact island supporting an overhang was completely trimmed by the support / object XY separation distance. Such filtering made sense to reduce excessive supports before introduction of support blockers and paint-on supports, however the filtering step was the reason of PrusaSlicer support generator seemingly not respecting the support overhang threshold and support enforcers #1324.
• Fixed missing interface layers for snug supports by propagating full overhangs before trimming by the support / object XY separation distance when generating interface layers. This change together with the previous topic significantly improves #6058 #6902.
• Rounding / merging of snug supports using the closing radius parameter is now smoother, it does not produce sharp corners.
• When calculating snug support interfaces below support contacts, the projected support contact areas are expanded to produce wider, printable and more stable interfaces. This fixes some missing snug support interfaces.
• For grid supports, supports supporting steep overhangs are not covered with dense support interfaces, because steep overhangs are mostly self supporting. However this strategy did not work well for the snug supports with narrow towers, thus overhangs with all angles are newly covered with support interfaces #6331.
• For snug supports the interface layers are newly angled at 45 degrees from the base supports and they alternate their direction by 90 degrees, making the interfaces cohesive.
• Fixed planning of support interface layers with rafts and larger Z gap for supports than for the raft.
• Regression to PrusaSlicer 2.4.0-alpha1: Some of the support interfaces were not supported by the sparse support again #7014.
• Fixed soluble interface support interfaces / non soluble base for support enforcers, where base support was supporting an object without interface layers #2849.