PrusaSlicer 2.3.0-alpha1

PrusaSlicer PrusaSlicer 2.3.0-alpha1

Summary

This is the first alpha release of PrusaSlicer 2.3.0, introducing paint-on custom FDM supports and seams, ironing of the top layers, monotonic and adaptive cubic and cubic support infills, per-extrusion g-code preview & standalone G-code Viewer, neat notification center in the 3D scene, imperial units support, SLA supports improvements, collapsible side bar, floating presets dialog and fuzzy search in parameters, physical printer settings, nine new 3rd party printer profiles and many more new features, improvements and bugfixes.

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.

Complete description of improvements and changes with respect to the current PrusaSlicer 2.2.0 release ↗ follows.

FDM custom supports by painting

For quite a long time already, PrusaSlicer provides support enforcers and blockers so the user has control over support generation. While this method works, it is not a pleasure to work with and manipulating the blocks where the user wants them is quite tedious.

This release brings a tool to simply paint the areas where supports should be enforced or blocked, directly on the object. The tool is available from the left toolbar and is only shown in Advanced and Expert modes. After selecting an object and clicking the toolbar icon, all other objects are hidden so they do not obscure the view, the selected object is rendered in light gray to ensure contrast and the painting tool is activated.

overview

Left mouse button enforces supports, right button blocks them. The selection can be erased by Shift + mouse click. The size of the painting tool can be adjusted, as well as a cursor type: circular cursor paints all visible places inside the circle, possibly leaving unpainted areas in shaded areas, but never painting behind corners. Spherical cursor paints everything inside the sphere regardless of whether it is visible or not. You can also use the clipping plane tool to hide a part of the object, so that difficult to reach areas can be easily painted.

The Autoset by angle button allows to select all triangles that are "more horizontal" than a threshold. This can be used as a default for further manual editing to ensure that no overhangs are left unsupported. The overhang triangles are visualized in real-time while the threshold is being adjusted.

Do not forget to enable supports if you want to actually generate them. The painted areas are equivalent to the old support enforcer/blockers, so their behavior depends on Auto-generated supports checkbox status in Print Settings (it can also be adjusted in the main window sidebar, highlighted in the picture above). When left unchecked, supports will be generated for support enforcers only: enforce

If Auto-generated supports checkbox is checked, supports will be generated automatically, just not inside support blockers. This can be used to remove supports that are not necessary:

block

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your selection will not be completely obeyed when the painted region is small. The support generator itself works on a grid internally, the supported/unsupported areas cannot be infinitely detailed.

FDM seam placement by painting #946 #2527 #342 #728

Seams are inherent to FDM printing and they can negatively affect visual appearance of the model. PrusaSlicer always provided limited possibility to customize the seam placement in Print Settings to optimize for short travel moves, to keep the seams aligned on between successive layers, to randomize seam position along the contour, or to place it to the back of the model. The last option allows rudimentary manual control of seam placement by rotating the model on the build plate. In addition, PrusaSlicer always tried to hide the seams into share concave or convex corners and seam was never placed on an overhang.

This release introduces a new manual seam placement tool to provide more detailed control over the seam placement. The tool is accessible from the left toolbar and it is only shown in Advanced and Expert modes. After clicking on the icon, the user can paint 'Seam enforcers' or 'Seam blockers' on the model in a similar to how the new custom supports are painted.

The seam logic is the same as it was in previous releases, except that if there is a seam enforcer, it always places seams into the enforcer area. If there is a blocker, its area is excluded from possible seam candidates. The Nearest, Rear and Random options are still respected. When the Aligned option is active and enforcers are used, the seam is placed in the middle of the enforcer area. This allows to draw smooth seams over the model.

seam_painting

Two long-standing problems related to seam placement were fixed along the way:

• Seam set to Random did not produce really random positioning in some cases github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/issues/2162#issuecomment-630905183, ↗ inspired by #2222 thanks @DrLex0 #1409.
• Aligned seam should now be aligned even if an object slice consists of more than one island. The seam will newly be aligned on all the islands independently.