Hacking Vase Mode - 3D Printing Experiments

our bars mode a 3d printer salesman best friend if you've ever gone to a trade show where 3d printers were exhibited you would have no doubt seen baisemeaux being implemented on machines that people were trying to sell you why or VARs mode makes 3d printers look way faster than they really are and lets you print large interesting looking objects quickly in a sales room environment it's commonly used for well buzzers but in this video I'm going to show you my experiments to hack VARs mode do all sorts of other things like okay let's get started welcome back to making news guys so as I said bars mode is a very interesting setting you can employ in your 3d printing slicer to create interesting shape and the most important thing that sets bars mode apart is how it works so it's conventional 3d printing slicer for SDL machines will print layer by layer up and up at a certain increments 0.25 millimeters 0.1 doesn't matter it'll just print up and up and up vise mode is different instead of doing that in increments it will slowly build up an outline of a part and it will slowly drop or raise your dead access or z-axis which is your height to create that part this means that bars mode prints such as this are completely hollow they look impressive they weigh nothing because there's no plastic in them and they fit extremely quickly so I believe slicer was where visor mode originated from I may be completely wrong here so let me know in the comments if I am but fast mode has been around for a long time and it's conventionally used to print well visors it takes a cylinder and if you load an STL file of a cylinder it will print the base if you like and then run the visor mode up and then leave the top empty again if you like leaving you with a quick easy to print buzz but I wasn't convinced to use vaz mode just for visors I want to see how far I could push this fast referring method to print other things so I designed this it's basically just a hexagon with an increasingly steeper angle so it starts at 90 and then goes in 10 degree increments all the way to completely flat or I get 180 or or zero and I want to see how far you can push the visor mode before it will start failing so to start with I did this one so this is printed on the cheetah tech x1 and it's printed at 0.2 millimeter layer height with a point four millimeter nozzle and the output diameter was set with the automatic into the flight ready which is 0.48 I believe and it's interesting it got up to 50 degrees before completely failing as you can see here it's just made this is a spider web and it couldn't do anything beyond a 50 degree overhang which is already more than the recommended 45 degrees so we're already onto an interesting interesting investigation here then I want to see what an effect a lower layer height would have in making this file print successfully so I made a point 1 millimeter layer height test and it got up to 60 degrees which is interesting and it makes sense because although valve mode does incrementally lathe plastic on top of the previous layer it's not a step-by-step being if it does keep going up it does still have a certain distance between the previous layer in this case is half what I did before 22.1 and in this case it got to 60 degrees before failing it's interesting you can see beyond 60 degrees it starts to sort of make this weird illness and again like fail in an interesting manner what's interesting though is the transparency of the part as well because as the layers get steeper this further away from each other in space therefore the plastic gets a little bit thinner and it eventually fails so the first layers are quite quite opaque but that 60 degrees is actually pretty translucent you can actually see through it pretty easily which is pretty cool and as a final test I wanted to see one in effect increasing my extrusion which would have so I use the same machine again the 2d tech X month with a zero point four millimeter nozzle but in this case I made the extrusion with point eight millimeters which is double the nozzle diameter you might be thinking that why would you do that anger that's very very strange but it came up with this result which is really interesting so first art is tougher it's stronger than the other one because the layers the lines are thicker but what's really interesting is it got 270 degrees which is almost almost a complete over hand over nothing but what's fascinating again going back to the transparency is at 70 degrees it goes almost completely transparent but the previous layers were very sick and to be honest pretty ugly and completely opaque so that's an interesting experiment and what I developed is a technique to use meshmixer to show you if a file would be 3d printable in bars mode so for a start bars mode has a few rules it is continuous line therefore you cannot have a file that branches off into little points because the yeah so imagine that extruder has to then jump between points and it's no longer true bars mode needs to go in the continuous outline it can expand and contract it can go within itself in all sorts of contortions that it can't jump between points that's the first rule second rule again as we said our overhangs so the technique I came up with in meshmixer to measure if an overhang would work or not would be to get the file then you go into the overhangs analysis and you enter the being number that your machine capable of by doing this test again this otherwise file will be in the description of the video if you're interested in using it to test your machines capabilities so where it shows red that's where it's beyond the overhang cache building so it's showing red that's most likely they're going to going to fail in your buyers mode testing and it sets the other side because again it does apply to both sides that overhang whether it will succeed or not just flip the model hundred eighty degrees using the transform tool then use the analysis again and see if there's any red hopefully you shouldn't see any red except for the base room you can have the face flat like with this model here that's fine on this on the base of the printer but that wouldn't work like that if that makes sense so that's the technique I came up with two test files that I download to see if they would work in Bosman surprisingly a lot of them do work but you will see little areas of red which would normally fail to keep it in mind but then I got to thinking it's these areas that fail leave openings maybe I can make bars mode intentionally leave openings so I did this this was my first test in experimenting with this sort of intentionally leaving voids in bars mode it's a cone that I have voxel eyes in mesh which is easy to make solid tool and the the blocky option it's pretty much chosen to lock the block and I intentionally dip it and slice it with VARs mode because each block has a flat top but VARs mode isn't going to print that it's going to jump to the next outline and it jumps and jumps and jump jump as it goes around so from this view it looks completely good but when you rotate it it's actually completely Hollow and an interesting side effect potentially much strong than it would be if it was just a single outline actually because it's triangulated itself the outline the jump they're not perfect because it's over thinner so they kind of make little triangles so with that in mind I looked at practical applications of doing this kind of void in bars mode testing the first thing I counted was a pencil holder and you would have seen that printing on my pressure ice remark to review sort of a really interesting wavy look and that that worked it printed fine and I was really happy with the design but it didn't work functionally because it was too thin and light the thing that size mode you're printing quick there's not much material so you know the pathway nothing which you're going to keep in mind so back to the drawing board I thought okay what else could i print that would be functional and I got the idea of a strawberry pot so a strawberry pot takes the runners of strawberries and it has openings on the side where they can spill out because strawberries like to you know have those runners and they like to spread out so that there's especially quite special pots designed for it so I thought okay I'll design is this file so this file took a quite a while infusion to work out the overhangs and work out how it would work but essentially it's the same it's the same concept as this cone it's built up to a massive flat that is ignored in bars mode especially in simplified 2d if you turn off all top layers which I have done to make it an open top and it builds up and then jumps across it does a massive bridge across these openings I wanted to make sure that bridge was a complete straight line you can't bridge your curves because the plastic will follow the path of us in there so I inserted a little sort of bevels or champers I suppose that makes that bridge flat and not in a curve and it eventually comes back to the curve and builds up again so this took a few iterations the first one I tried was this I want to make it because I like printing the pots in biodegradable material visual PLA by the way this is the algae PLA I tested a while ago from 3d fuel and I did make a pot using this it was a small mini nuke pot quite a while ago it just stinks though it smells so that I could not keep this going it's think of the whole room and the the drip from it is ridiculous the melting temperature is very low and although this one I did slice with the bigger not extrusion with the point-eight extrusion with soda is stronger than my final that just looks terrible so that was not very good now I tried a wooden one which was actually decent apart from those overhangs again they are over thinner and if the plastics not cooling quick enough especially with these material filled PLA they don't cool very fast you get this sort of awful look didn't like that can I try to put in the poly alchemy elixir which actually worked pretty well I've left that with my mum because she liked it and the final outcome was this which is actually using the PLA that came with a pressurized tree as it was a nice looking PLA and it printed really well again this was printed on the pressurized remark too and I'm really happy this results got a few deviations you know where the cooling is not so great but honestly for an experiment this is pretty cool and I'm really happy with the outcome there's a few things to note is because it's doing a continuous outline it will sometimes jump over areas you don't want it to jump like here you can see it's jumped over where that opening is but again it's at the skin line no normal even know that was there so just to finish up I sent this file to my buddy Aidan who runs the XYZ Aidan YouTube channel and he recently bought a two millimeter diameter nozzle for his 3d printer 2 millimeter it was ridiculous but I really like the idea of pumping out fast prints using a six model when you want a large functional object quickly and you're not too worried about the finish of it so I sent in this file said give it a crack and he actually managed to print if he put it with one millimeter layer height which is still nuts but and it's and it's got the two millimeter diameter nozzle so that would be a really strong functional pot this one you know you know it's too it's too flimsy honestly but um I would like to try that sort of thing in feature I want to get a large diamond a muzzle it was a volcano hot in from e3d and maybe like there's a really quick big fast printer that is very good at printing fast as mode prints thank you very much guys for watching hope you enjoyed this experiment in bars mode and me pushing it to do things other than visors because after all it is very fast and it uses very little material and it looks impressive so if you need it to do a functional object as well other than a bars I suppose then all the better if you enjoy this video here on makers these guys hit that subscribe button helping out a master map I loved reading this content from our brand-new studio here in Wollongong I look for to seeing again very shortly catch letter guys bye the each place this place satellite

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 1,144,295

Rating: 4.8765254 out of 5

Keywords: experiment, vase mode, slic3r, simplify3D, test, tutorial, how to, strawberry pot, practical 3D Print, hacking, 3D Printer, project, PLA, makesmuse, makers muse, angus deveson, australia, slicer, incredible, awesome, 3D Printing, overhang

Id: HZSFoFYpBaA

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Tomislav3D]

He is definitely right about the big nozzles. They are great for large objects which require little to no detail. Yet there are plenty of people who would print such as objects for 40 hours longer...

[u/[deleted]]

Really good video. Thanks for this.

[u/WrpSpdMrScott]

Neat!!! Thanks for posting.

[u/nonfish]

That voxel cone is fascinating. Actually, all of this is fascinating.