But what really caught my eye were all of the infill patterns. Here you can select what extruder you would like to print your infill, so if you want to run a cheaper material inside of your print or get creative with a bright color infill inside of a transparent exterior you can if you have a dual extruder setup. All of the options have just about every option you can think of, hell you can even change the shape of the ooze shield. It creates a shell around your print for when you are using two extruders to protect the print from plastic dripping onto it from the recently used hotend. The Ooze shield options are also for multi-color or material printing. You have the prime pillar option that prints a tower next to your print to prime the color, this is mostly for printing in multiple colors with one extruder. The other two options, on the other hand, are a little more unique. Those are both standard and were available on my previous software. There is also the option to turn on a raft. There is the standard skirt/brim option for priming your hotend or giving the print a little more contact area. The additions tab is all about different options you can add to your prints.
#SIMPLIFY 3D NOT STARTING AT HEIGHT MANUAL#
Having the option to actually set the starting point as a manual location is nice as well to hide a seam on the back of a print for example. The starting point option plays a big role in how good or bad your print can look and how long it takes it to print. We also have a few important options like Vase mode and the option to change where the start points are. 3mm thick and then set the actual speed, not just half of a number that isn’t on this page. I would much rather be able to say I want my first layer to be. The first layer speed, height, and width options are all here but I’m not really a big fan of the use of percentages. The top and bottom layers have to change depending on how thick your layer height is and also depending on your infill configuration. We can also set the number of top, bottom, and perimeter layers/shells. On the Layer tab, we finally start to get into key settings that will most likely get tuned a lot. That said MatterControl is easier to navigate and it also highlights any settings you change from your base profile and makes it easy to take the setting back to stock later. Compare this to MatterControl’s settings in the photo below it's clear that while MatterControl has a lot of settings, Simplif圓D has even more. The first tab just has a few main settings for the printer configuration like the nozzle size then at the end are the retraction settings. Well opening up the advanced settings keeps all of the original options but now gives you a whole selection of tabs to flip through. I, however, needed to get into the advanced settings to get things working.
This is great for a school or someone who wants to get everything tuned perfectly then keep the settings simple. You also have the option to turn on supports and change the infill percentage.
Simplif圓D starts with a basic mode where you just select from the pre-configured material types and the quality levels. Once you select your printer it imports a basic profile and from there you can make tweaks and changes as needed. When you first start up the program it will run a wizard that checks online to get a list of all of the printer profiles available.
#SIMPLIFY 3D NOT STARTING AT HEIGHT SOFTWARE#
I didn’t immediately jump into Simplif圓D, I was in the middle of testing the Rostock MAX v3 so I didn’t want to introduce any extra variables, but anytime I had a chance to print things that didn’t relate to my testing I spent time messing around in Simplif圓D trying to get a feel for the software and working on getting things tuned. So today I’m going to dive in and check out what their software is all about. They happened to be based out of Ohio like we are, so I reached out and they send over a copy and I have been testing it alongside my testing of the Rostock MAX v3. Well, one of the more popular programs for handling most 3d printers is called Simplif圓D. Beyond that, it was easy to use, but over time I started to notice more and more limitations and I was really curious what else was out there. Setup was easy because they work directly with SeeMeCNC and it had the profiles for both printers. For over 7 months of printing on the SeeMeCNC Eris’ and the Rostock MAX v3, I have been using the suggested software MatterControl.