Bear with me for a moment, because I’m not sure how to describe this problem without just describing a part I’m trying to print.

I was designing a part today, and it’s basically a box; for various reasons I wanted to print it with all the sides flat on the print bed, but have bridges between the sides and the bottom to act as living hinges so it would be easy to fold into shape after it came off the bed. But when I got it into PrusaSlicer, by default, Prusa slices all bridges in a single uniform direction–which on this print meant that two of the bridges were across the shortest distance, and the other two were parallel to the gap they were supposed to span. Which, y’know, is obviously not a good way to try to bridge the gap.

I was able to manually adjust the bridge direction to fix this, but I’m kinda surprised that the slicer doesn’t automatically choose paths for bridging gaps to try to make them as printable as possible. I don’t remember having this issue in the past, but I haven’t designed with bridges in quite a while–it’s possible that I’ve just never noticed before, or it could be that a previous slicer (I used to use Cura) or previous version of PrusaSlicer did this differently.

Is there a term for this? Are there slicers that do a better job of it? Is there an open feature request about this?

Basically just wondering if anyone has insight into this, or any suggestions for reading on the subject.

Thanks!

  • dave@hal9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    15 days ago

    Not sure, but I think I know what you’re talking about… Have you checked SuperSlicer? I’m not saying they have a solution - hadn’t used it in years and just checked it out again recently. It’s a fork of PrusaSlicer that has a lot of advanced and niche tweaks. Just one example I noticed when I downloaded it recently: do you know about the floating hole issue for bolt inserts, where slicers just make bridged circles floating in air, and you have to do some hack with one layer thick square cutouts in the model to fix that? SuperSlicer has a built in option for it that just already slices that correctly - saw it in their release notes and tried it, worked great.

    That is all to say, they have a lot of advanced tweaks for slicing issues, in the familiar package of Slic3r and PrusaSlicer UI, so might be worth checking it out

    • monotremata@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      I was being an idiot. It does bridge correctly, it just got confused because the bridges were close enough together that it thought it had to make them one single bridge. Thanks!