Okay, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of my Form 3+ review miniseries: Print quality,
speed, and the software.
The parts that a 3D printer produces should be the number one reason why you’re getting
one in the first place, and at the end of the day, by what means a 3D printer makes
that happen should be more or less irrelevant.
But how fast it gets and how many hoops you will have to jump through in the process,
that, very much does matter.
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I find that print quality on the Form 3+ is complicated, because it’s not directly comparable
to MSLA machines.
so let’s start with something that’s a bit easier to quantify - print speed.
So, here, there is also not one single, fixed factor, like the Form 3+ is X percent slower
or faster than for example the SL1S.
Print speeds vary with the resin you choose, and how fast a resin gets cured actually makes
more of a difference on a LFS, low force stereolithography printer like the Form 3+ than on MSLA, a masked
stereolithography apparatus, like the SL1S, because MSLA already spends very little time
actually exposing the resin and more time on the peel cycle, which is something you
can not really speed up, while LFS spends more time on the exposure, so that becomes
a bigger variable time chunk.
And the other thing is, MSLA does not care how much you fill up each layer - the LCD
just exposes the entire thing at once, while LFS has to trace out more area with its laser
dot if you’re using more of the build area.
So if we compare print times of the Strata Miniatures Rogue, with support and all, at
a 50µm layer, printing one on the Form 3+ takes about 2 hours, and one hour on the SL1S.
But to show the maximum difference, we can fit up to 8 of the minis on the SL1S and it’s
still going to the exact same time at one hour, while the Form 3+ now estimates 7 hours
of print time for completing the same 8 models.
This is quite a detailed model, so I tried with a less detailed one, and that drastically
reduces the advantage MSLA has in this case, but in real-world print times, it’s still
going to take 3 times as long.
Because the thing is, with the estimates in Formlabs’ PreForm, I had to consistently
add pretty much exactly 50% to get to the real-world print time.
A two hour fifteen minute print actually takes 3 and a half.
An 8 hour print actually takes 12.
So here are print time comparisons with the corrected times for the Form 3+ against the
SL1S.
And yes, some parts just don’t fit one the SL1S, it’s just a less capable printer in
that regard.
So, yes, this is not the fairest of comparisons.
But I find that with the print times on the Form 3+, it pushes many prints into “overnight”
territory instead of still being completed on the same work day and being able to start
the print for another iteration to then be ready the next day.
So with this sort of throughput, I wouldn’t put the Form 3+ into the “it’s going to
run 24/7 to make parts” category - well, it would have to run that much if you were
trying to do any sort of volume with it, but in stark contrast I think the software package
would actually be very well suited for it.
I believe the way that Formlabs intends for you to use the Form 3+ is through their cloud
connection - and that’s what I did.
You can also use it with a direct local network connection, too, or through USB if you can’t
use the cloud service for whatever reason.
But PreForm is the software you will be using with the Form 3+ or any of their other machines,
you’re not going to be setting up your own slicer or anything.
And that’s good - it’s good software.
You can actually download it for free yourself and use it as much as you’d like, but overall,
it fits in very well with the theme of the rest of the printer - that’s hide everything
that you as the user don’t need to worry about and just give you the core tools that
you actually need.
So in PreForm the most complex settings menu is the options you can set for configuring
how support material gets generated - you mostly don’t even need to touch those, I’ve
only ever had to increase the support density on this first Steamdeck print, and then the
second one printed perfectly.
Everything else is really simple - it’s got checks for how well a model is going to
print based on its geometry and orientation, it’s got an auto align tool, auto layout,
auto support, you can do all those things manually, but you don’t have to.
I’ve found the auto orient tool to be a bit confusing as it always gives you a different
orientation every time you run it and then, basically you get to decide what’s going
to work and what won’t, but in that case, I could just as easily orient my parts by
hand.
I was expecting something like in PrusaSlicer where you get to choose what aspect you want
to optimize for, and then it gives you the one optimal orientation for that.
Also, in PreForm, sometimes it decides to orient the part in a way where it doesn’t
even fit inside the printer, and in that case, of course, you’ll have to manually align
it yourself anyway.
The preset is to always print everything with a brim and suspended in supports, you can
print directly on the build plate, but I assume because the printer doesn’t have any build
plate tramming, the first couple layers are printed really thick, which doesn’t matter
if it’s just doing the brim, you’re throwing that away anyway, but if it’s already printing
your part at that point, the first millimeter or so might get squished and will end up with
less detail.
One thing I noticed was that PreForm was rather slow, especially on detailed models, and at
least on the quad-core i5 laptop with 8GB of RAM that I usually use.
So I benchmarked again on my Threadripper workstation with 64GB of RAM and broke down
the times for importing, auto orienting, and from this point on with the same orientatiosn
between the slicers, adding supports, layouting, calculating print time and then exporting,
with a simpler model and a larger, more complex one, and in both cases, PreForm was much,
much slower than what I was used to from PrusaSlicer, especially when adding support material - and
PreForm repeatedly crashed on me here when trying to update support material after already
having generated it once.
That might just be something my setup, though.
Exporting was also quite slow, but it includes slicing the model and then uploading it to
Formlab’s servers.
With a more complex model, though, like the 3 million polygon hollowed-out SaltyMcCreed
that I keep using, you’re going to be spending at least 10 minutes preparing the file with
your computer’s CPU pegged for a large part of that time.
And yes, it did actually make good use of all 24 CPU cores, so give it all you’ve
got.
On the upside, though, again, PreForm is a pleasure to use, with great visualizations
of what areas are critical on your print and even small details like fading out the bring
as you look at your parts from the underside.
What I would like to see, though,is a hollowing feature for artistic models that otherwise
you’d have to print as a solid block.
Formlabs recommend using Meshmixer for that.
I used, again, PrusaSlicer and a fictional large-volume SL1S profile, because you can
quite easily export the processed stl files from there.
So what about print quality?
Like I alluded to earlier, it’s not quite a clear-cut answer.
One on the one hand, the Form 3+ definitely delivers what you would expect from a resin
printer - fine details that get reproduced perfectly, no visible layer lines and high
mechanical accuracy.
The Form 3+ does all of these perfectly and parts fit to each other and to other real-life
components perfectly.
But that’s something that you can expect from any resin printer these days, let alone
one that costs 4 and a half grand.
I did notice that parts printed on the Form 3+ looked more like professionally injection
molded parts than any 3D printed parts I’ve ever done.
They don’t have that shimmer or sheen that gets created by the part being made from individual
voxels that essentially have six square sides, but the surface here is much more continuous
because it does trace the outline of each layer as a vector.
But I don’t know if this is an artifact of that effect or if it’s something that
is actually measureable, but the prints off of an SL1S still looked crisper to my eyes
than the ones from the Form 3+.
For reference, each pixel on the SL1S is slightly smaller than 50µm or 2 thou in size, while
the laser spot on the Form 3+ is 85µm, or 10/3 of a thou - plus the effect of having
to “walk” in and out of detailed areas, which again reduces its ability to reproduce
those super crisp details.
The other thing I noticed, and this really is just something that is complaining on very
high level, is that large, smooth surfaces like the screen area on the Steamdeck seem
to have some streaks that catch the light a bit differently that line up with where
the rollers of the LPU move along the X axis.
This is only an issues, though, if you plan on showing the parts straight off the printer
and need them to look flawless, but any sort of post-processing will easily cover that
up.
What’s important, though, is that print quality is consistent and predictable and
that’s in large parts a result of how closely software, hardware and materials are intertwined
on the Form 3 ecosystem.
We’ll get into the ups and downs of that in the next video, but to close out print
quality: It’s really good!
I think I expected next-level fine detail reproduction, because that’s what you kind
of associate with this thing using a freaking laser, but it doesn’t do that.
In that regard, it is getting beat by MSLA.
It does create superbly professional-looking parts, but it sure does take its sweet time
for that.
In the next, and I promise, last video of the Form 3+ review, I’m going to take a
look at usability, which is one the extremely strong points of the Form 3+, I’ll talk
about the lock-in that comes with achieving that and I’ll draw a conclusion to see who
exactly this machine is made for.
Thank you all for watching, keep on making, and I’ll see you in the next one.