Comment

Comment by soneil

A bit of a tangent, but on your note amount multi-material being wasteful - you can improve that a lot by thinking ahead in your design and being strategic about where you use colour.

Your benchy is almost a worst-case scenario (which is likely intentional) - because the coloured features are vertical, there will be several changes per printed layer. If you can constrain your material changes to layer boundaries you'll get a much better waste ratio.

A good example of this is printing coloured labels/features on a faceplate. So you print the whole faceplate in a single material, then switch material and print the highlight colour as raised features. That gets you a lot of result for a single material change. (On single-material printers there's a method where you strategically pause the print and swap the materials by hand. Learning lessons from that will really hammer home the mindset of optimising tool changes!)

There's a lot of lessons like this you'll pick up, where making your design sympathetic to the print process can have huge payoffs.

parent soneil 1 year ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton