In all the time I've been making videos, I don't think I've yet done
one specifically about Prusaslicer. Well, I guess it's finally time.
Prusaslicer 2.4 released not too long ago, and I've been meaning to make a
video about the new features for a while now. I like to consider myself fashionably
late to the party but I think a lot of you might not have upgraded yet or maybe
not even tried the slicer yet so I'll still cover these new features anyway.
One of the main reasons I am so late doing this is because I found the number of new features,
frankly, a bit intimidating. I made a short list in my notepad of the ones I want to cover,
good luck reading that, but I realised pretty early on that this is going to
be about three videos. This is the first, and if you can read my writing then you'll
see I've numbered the three points I want to go through so let's get right to it.
Installing the new version is different, I think, to older versions,
I just wanted to show you this a bit, there's a kind of wizard process to add your printers.
I haven't used prusaslicer in a while so I felt like starting from scratch anyway, I might import
my old profiles later but since I last used this slicer I've changed one printer to direct drive,
and added a geetech, and retired two other printers, so it feels like time for a refresh.
For the two extruder printer I did have to add the extra extruder afterwards.
But we're not here to talk about that, we're here to talk about new features.
First up is the auto colour change detection feature which I'm excited about because I do
make a lot of signs, being that kind of person. I have to say this is more of a quality of life
feature because it doesn't do anything that you couldn't do before. How it works, is it
uses an algorithm to determine whether the object you are slicing is a sign or not.
Here's a sign I made to test it.
Basically you slice it, THEN the dialog comes up in the corner like so
and you click it, and it puts the colours in, and you have to slice again.
Of course I had to know how prusaslicer decides what makes a sign a sign,
and I couldn't find it documented anywhere. So I poked around in the code, and found this.
trying to understand code is literally the worst way of documenting a feature so I'm
probably going to get some of this wrong, but you can see this section contains the
logic...I think it's all the logic actually which is nice. We've got...if it's a new print,
set a delta_area variable to something...25.. then work out the x, y and height and check
if the object's height divided by longest side is greater than 0.3,
so we're looking for something flat basically here I think, if not it jumps out of the if statement
then it does some stuff where it's testing if 25% of the height is a solid object,
using some maths I'm not going to work out, but it's based on that delta variable from before, and
as you see from the comment the bottom layer to object size is also important.
and if all this is true, you will get the "sliced object looks like the sign"
notification which is translated to whatever language you are in.
So thats actually pretty reasonable I think. Of course you could fool it
into thinking you have a sign when you don't, but whatever, just don't click on the prompt.
I like this functionality because it saves you having to work out which layer to colour change,
and it saves you having to learn HOW to colour change, if you haven't done it before.
Essentially it puts what's in this box here in the machine settings,
into the gcode, here as we can see if I search for it.
And it works fine as you can hopefully see in my footage, when the printer hits the M600
code it will behave however its firmware has told it to, either spitting out the filament
or making you change it, by the way if you have an ender 3 v2 like I do,
you absolutely must install jyers or another firmware for this to work,
stock firmware does not work with M600, I forget how, I think it's an issue with not being able
to disable individual steppers but I don't want to revisit that - just install jyers.
Anyway - And, this is good, if you have a multiple extruder printer, or in my case the geeeeeetech A
series with the mixing nozzle, they have provision for that too. Instead of the colour change code
it will put tool change code in there instead. So for the geeetech, it will stick a T1 in instead.
This is why it's super important if you have a mixing nozzle,
to set up two extruders when you add the printer.
Thats enough of that though, next feature.
Negative volumes, this is probably the most underrated feature of the whole release.
Seriously. If you CAD you will immediately recognise this as a boolean operation or whatever,
you can do this in all cad packages and it's pretty core to making just about anything.
The key takeaway...pun intended...is that prusaslicer is letting you do these
operations on an STL, and it's really neat, you don't end up with a weird meshy mess,
so it's something you need to be using if you aren't already.
I set up a couple of scenarios to help you figure out some uses.
First, I put a cylinder through a benchy and made a benchy bead. The cool thing about this
feature is that you're adding a modifier to the object itself, so when you shrink it,
the modifier shrinks too. This is really user friendly. And of course I printed it out.
Next scenario is to put screw holes in just about anything, almost effortlessly.
Finally and this is most cool of all, you can make your own STL shaped holes in anything too. So
you can subtract one object from another. Apart from hilarious composite objects, of
course this means you can personalise stuff with any logo or image so long as it's a 3d object.
So, finally for this episode, we have mesh simplification. Again this is something
really cool that you would normally need to use another package for, in this case I think blender
is probably the go-to tool for this, and blender does it well, but again prusaslicer is doing this
effortlessly and really well, see here I simplify the standard rabbit. The cool thing is that this
is iterative, meaning you can simplify it all the way, then simplify again, and it will work fine.
Net result, a really cool polygon rabbit. This is definitely a feature I will be using a lot.
So that's the first of I think probably three videos on this new version, I feel like
by the time I get to the last one, there will be another new version with another raft of features,
at the rate they're going. So thumbs up to the
prusaslicer developers if you end up watching this, I know I didn't
expect any attention from ultimaker in my last video but was surprised that it
got some, so if you're watching this prusaslicer devs...keep at it...and...tree supports....ahem
I'm going to see you next time with a printer review,
I know what you're thinking at this point, oh no, he's sold out. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't - but
I'm hoping to combine a printer review with some really useful content, so be sure to watch the
next video, I promise it won't be like the usual printer unboxing and review stuff.
Anyway that's it - go make some cool stuff with these new features and
show me it on discord! Thank you for watching!