Have you ever found a line down the side of your 3d print? well that's called the
seam and there's ways to reduce that or possibly eliminate it. if you've got a
print that has a sharp corner you can do all this in Cura and I'll show you how
on today's Filament Friday. Filament Friday is brought to you by these
patreon supporters. this is my CHEP pawn it's the first 3d design I ever did in
Tinkercad and I printed this big one on my Artemis back here. when I printed it I
didn't make the outer layer thick enough so it's got wavy lines where the infill
is actually popping through and that's easy to fix by printing with a thicker
outer layer. but it's also got this line going down the center that's the seam.
the seam is caused when it lays the outer layer and it moves up and goes to
the next layer. where it moves up it leaves a little extra plastic and if it
stops at the same point all the way up you end up with a line or a seam all the
way up your print. now in the Cura slicer you can adjust that. you can randomize it
so it stops at various points but then you'll have little extra plastic all
over your print so you can sand those off and smooth out your print and then a
round print can look like there's no seam. Another option that Cura gives you
is you can put the seam on a corner so if you have a print that has a corner
like this cube, I printed the seam on the edge. that way there's no seam on any
surface and you don't really notice it. There's another feature that Cura has
where you can select an x and y coordinate of where you want the seam to
be. So even if it's round but you know it's always going to be facing one way
that this is gonna be the back of it you can place the seam there and you can do
that just by setting certain coordinates. so that's all done in a cura slicer so
let's take a look at how that's done inside Cura.Let's start with this round
hollow cylinder, prints really easy, I'll go into shell. I have three outer layers
and then if I scroll down you can see I've selected outer before inner walls
so it's going to print the outer and then the inner and then fill the gaps in between
because I have that set to everywhere. z seem aligned
is where the Z Seam is controlled. there's four different options
user-specified, shortest, random and sharpest corner. seam corner preferences
below that there's none, hide seam, expose scene or hide or expose seam to
To start we're just gonna use shortest for the shortest speed and exposed seam so
we know where the seam is and when we slice it and look in the simulator you
can see it starts at the same point over here on the side both inside and outside.
fills the gap and it starts at the same point again at the next layer. and here's
the print. and you can clearly see the seam both on the inside lined up with
the outside. it's lying down the center of it is the seam so now we know what a
seam looks like so now let's try to get rid of it. so let's go hide seam now I'd
hope this would do better but you'll see it doesn't do a whole lot because it
starts at about the same point it goes inside and then fills in the gap so it
doesn't look a whole lot different. so I was wondering how it hides the seam and
the fact is it doesn't. this doesn't look any different.
so the hide seam setting to me is completely useless inside or outside the
seam is very easy to see. so I don't see the point of this setting. so now let's
go up to Z seam alignment and choose random so that way it should start at
different points both inside and outside. and when we slice this and look in the
simulator here's the starting point of the outer layer and the inner layer is
different and then it fills in and then the next layer it started at a different
point. so it is randomly jumping around this thing both inside and outside. and
here's the print. you see little spots where you can see where it started and
stopped but there's no seam. there's nothing lined up so it's a little
smoother. now let's try user-specified. this
accepts you're going to have a seam but you want to put it at a specific spot. to
do this I suggest you do seam relative. that way everything is relative to the
center point. now this is a twenty millimeter diameter so it's ten
millimeters from the center at all points x and y so let's set X to zero
and Y to ten and let's see what that does. when we look at a preview it starts
at the back of the print so it's y 10 but X zero and they're both starting at
the same point. so now let's go back and we'll change this to X ten y zero and it
starts over here on the right so positive is to the back and to the right.
so let's try negative ten on the X and leave Y is zero and it flips
absolutely to the opposite side. so negative 10 is to the left so we should
be able to do negative 10 here on Y and 0 for X and get to the bottom or get to
the front really. and there we go. now what if I want to get in between the two
like over here. I don't have that exact number because this is round so I know
10 by 10 would be out here at a corner so let's just try that. 10 and
minus 10. And look where it ends up. it should be out here but it knows to go on
to the print. so it positions it at like 45 degrees. so if I want to go to the
other point I just reverse it and now I'm on the other side. so that's how you
can position it wherever you want. now let's try a square. if you have a square
you can put the seam in the corner so let's select sharpest corner. now it
should automatically choose this. Now. you can use that position to put it on which
corner, but this one will take the sharpest corner. how it decides that I
have no idea but that's what it decided here. Here's the sharpest corner and
every time this runs, in the simulator runs faster for square, it stops at this
same point fills in starts at that same point so
let's see how this looks after it's printed. and here it is. all the corners
are smooth. It looks really good. three of them anyway. then you can see where the
seam is because it gets really rough. it's very obvious that this is the seam.
Even from the top you can see where the lines started and stopped. if you're
rubbing your finger across it you can feel it's rough. but there's the corner
seam. whether your prints are big or small you now know how to reduce or
eliminate the seam on your 3d print. I hope this helped you out. let me know in