Master infill to take your 3D prints to the next level

infill is an integral part to your 3D printed models so why not master it today we'll cover Basics right up to the experimental [Music] I have spent some time experimenting with infill and I'm excited to share my results this video started in response to the many commenters asking about the patterned peo sheet I've been using with some of my printers it leaves the same pattern on the bottom layer of the print so I wondered could I replicate that with a plain bed and what else could I achieve with experimentation we'll get to that later because for now we're going to start with some Basics we're going to start from the very beginning by answering the question what is infill the easiest way to answer this is to look at the G-Code preview for a sliced model the most common one that you would know would be the sparse infill on the inside seen here as a mesh pattern in red when we slice one parameter that most people will be familiar with is the density of this bus infill and if we up that to 50 re-slicing shows that the pattern is a lot more dense that should ensure more strength but it also will mean additional printing time and additional filament used conversely if we lower the infield density right down to one percent we can see that there's almost nothing there with a drastic reduction in model printing time as well as filament usage the next type of info we have is on the top and bottom of the model and we call this solid infill we can think of solid infill as having the equivalent density of 100 if we hide all of the other components we can see that we have this solid infill on any top-facing surfaces as well as any bottom facing surfaces and sandwiched inside that we can see that we also have internal solid infill but this is a poor example so let's slice something else instead let's load in this low polyfox if we look inside we can see that we have much more of this internal solid infill shown here with a purple color hiding the outer walls will show that it's used in numerous places to fill in any little gaps and to provide a better base for other forms of Extrusion to go on top now that we have a baseline let's start exploring how we can adjust parameters to suit various scenarios before we start just a little bit of housekeeping and future proofing one thing to to note is that in this video I'm using Orca slicer a derivative of bamboo studio and prusa slicer while the positions of these parameters may change if you poke around or search you should be able to find the same settings in prusa slicer and super slicer there's many settings that I can't cover in the scope of this video so instead I'm looking to some great resources online such as this prusa slicer page about infill with examples of each as well as their pros and cons I'm also linking an equivalent page for bamboo Studio that applies to Orca slicer as well and this was harder to find but Cura also has a page going through some of the different infills with Illustrated examples okay our first scenario deals with when we're trying to say filament and generally when we say filament we save time as well let's take this simple cylinder and say that it's only cosmetic as in it doesn't need to be strong at all when it's finished slicing it without changing any settings for me uses just over 45 grams of filament and a print duration of 1 hour and 12 minutes and we can can see inside that the sparse infill is anything but one of the first things that we can do is lower the amount of solid infill on the top and bottom surfaces but this only saves a gram and a half of filament and only two minutes of printing time so what about if we lower the sparse infield density that's taken off almost 10 grams and 10 minutes as well let's lower it even further to a very minimal two percent we can see that we're now using about half of the original filament and we've taken off almost half an hour but there is a problem with this setup and that's that we can see the internal infill through the top of the model and not only that the surfaces Where It's Not underneath are quite rough and that's because as the extruder lays down the solid Extrusion for the top it's going to drape between these meaning the top surface is not quite flat and loses some quality now of course we can up the infill density but that will also up the filament in time but fortunately there's a spice Enfield pattern that's designed for this scenario and that is lightning in fill when we slide ice and at the base of the model it looks like there's pretty much nothing there but as we go up through the layers the lightning will grow until it's supporting most of the underside of the top layer even after turning the density up we save around 12 minutes from our printing time but our filament usage is nearly halved so the next time you have a cosmetic model why not try lightning infill for models where we do need some strength but we still want to say filament there's a backup option and that is support cubic once again previewing from the bottom we can see that the triangles are more spaced out but as we rise up towards the top surface the density increases and the top surface will be nicely supported not much of a time saving here but again a substantial reduction in filament and a fairly strong part as well beyond what we've just seen here's a universal way to save print time for pretty much any model the first thing to note is that some spice infill patterns will be faster than others typically those with straight lines like rectilinear grid and lion will be faster than something like make home and we can see that with the honeycomb pattern and the same 15 density our print time has ballooned to almost two and a half hours one great setting in every Slicer in Orca slicer is called in-field combination and when we tick it and slice we can see we've saved almost 15 minutes without changing any other settings if we change the preview to layer height it becomes obvious what's going on the outside perimeters are sliced with a typical 0.2 millimeter layer height but the layer height of the sparks in fill within is twice as thick at 0.4 so as the model is printing every second layer the infield will be laid down but twice as thick this is a guaranteed way to save print time but just keep in mind that these larger extrusions will require a lot more hot end flow so if your hot end flow is already marginal this might push it over the edge in prusa slicer we activate this setting by changing combined infill every from one layer to two or more however this will be limited by the nozzle width in super slicer we have to antique supporting dense layer and then we can up this value from one to something higher simplify 3D has it in the infield Tab and it's called combined infill layers and in Cura the setting is called infill layer thickness and we can achieve the same results by multiplying it by the layer height in this example 0.2 to 0.4 now let's look at a part where we want it to be strong but we don't want to be wasteful with our filament use our example object is this spurgy and the first thing we want to do anytime we want maximum strength is to increase the perimeters or wall Loops apart from that I'm slicing with default settings and we can see that the infill is a little bit hit and miss in reinforcing each of these gear tips obviously one strategy here is to Simply up the sparse infield density which will fill up these areas much more uniformly now we've got what we want around the delicate areas but it's also quite dense through the middle to combat this we can change from grid to a pattern called adaptive cubic but as you can see all of the triangles are quite uniform and it took me a little while to work out why it wasn't working as the documentation said the manual clearly shows that towards the edges we should have smaller denser infill and much Spicer towards the middle saving some filament so why aren't we saying that well let's visualize what's going on cubic infield in any form is made out of a pattern of these three-dimensional cubes tilted up on their tip and because this spur gear is so thin there's only so bigger Cube that you can fit vertically within the space so a larger tube that uses less filament won't be placed by the slicer because it simply doesn't fit so to experiment let's scale this not uniformly but instead making Zed much taller and when we look inside the slice model we can see at the bottom that it's dense and then the cubes get larger as we head towards the middle and then once again shrink as we head towards the top by making the model larger we can fit in larger and less dense cubes saving a lot of filament but not giving up much strength one thing to note is that you'll need a fairly high value for your infield density think of it as setting how dense you want the smaller sections to be and then the slicer will automatically make the intersections less dense so comparing regular cubic infield with 50 density we use just over 350 grams of filament and it takes just over 11 hours to print and by switching to Adaptive we should still have pretty much all of the strength we need in the delicate areas but we use more than 150 grams less filament and save around an hour and a half of print time definitely a great option as long as the model is large enough to take advantage of the structure everything so far has been quite sensible and practical so I think it might be time to get progressively more experimental let's start with improving the appearance of our models without doing any CAD work let's say we've got a simple shape and we want to make it look nicer with very little effort one thing you might consider is completely turning off the top and bottom solid infill to go with this I'd recommend upping your wall thickness slightly and then hitting slice to see how it looks Now the default infill pattern doesn't look particularly good but we can change it to something more interesting like honeycomb and then coming into quality and that the sparse infill width to twice as wide now when we slice we get a much more interesting object although I'm still unhappy with how some of these segments don't seem to be quite complete so all I'm going to do is up the density to make the pattern fit a little better and already we have a much more interesting looking part and the printed result looks just as good you probably wouldn't want to do this with a structural part as it's definitely weaker without the top and bottom solid layers to tie everything together let's try and recreate a patterned top and bottom surface similar to what we saw on that aftermarket plate the first thing to note is that we have more options than the default straight lines for our solid infill some of these are quite interesting such as octogram spiral concentric infill which will follow the perimeter shape inwards and probably my favorite the Hilbert curve for any of these to make them more prominent we want to come to Quality and for the first layer as well as the top surface double our Extrusion width on a 0.4 nozzle 0.8 is just about spot on this will increase the size of the extrusions making the pattern more prominent is the printed versions and I'm sure you'll agree they look a lot more interesting than what we normally see particularly the Hilbert curve there is a problem here however and that's at the bottom side of the model is typically squished and a lot of detail from the different patterns is lost if your bed surface is grippy enough you can overcome this by temporarily tweaking the Z offset to increase the distance between twin the nozzle and the bed here's a before and after with the increased distance on the right and I think this semi-squished pattern is the best appearance yet as interesting as this is we're not limited to only the top and bottom infill patterns with some lateral thinking we can also access all of the patterns found for sparse in fill to do this we need to right click and then add a modifier with a simple cylinder being sufficient with this generic cylinder selected on the left we're now going to come and resize it make sure uniform scale is not ticked setting the height to one layer thick 0.2 millimeters in my case and making the exterior Dimensions at least as big as our actual object we then need to move it into position so it just overlaps the bottom layer we can then select it make a copy here I did Ctrl C then control V on the keyboard and move that copy up so it just overlaps the top layer now for these modifiers we're going to click on them and come to strength we're going to turn off the bottom and top Solid layers and then change the sparse infill pattern to something like honeycomb you'll need to repeat these steps for the second modifier disc now when we slice the model we have quite a different effect because the model is being sliced as three different objects we'll get a one layer thick hexagon pattern with solid infill underneath and on top meaning that we should still have pretty good structural Integrity we'll notice the bottom is a little bit thicker than what we see on the top so all we need to do is adjust the sparse infill to that thicker diameter we might also need to play with the sparse infield density to get the upper and lower surfaces to match too again a distinctive appearance and something you normally wouldn't see on a 3D print but don't worry we can get even closer to this and we can get this pattern on the top as well in CAD I've drawn and extruded a simple triangle and then used a pattern to extend it and each of these has a tiny Gap in between the whole array is then exported as a single sdl I've scaled my disk larger and now I'm going to right click on it once again add a modify fire but this time come to load and then select the STL from my hard drive it's going to be really tall and you can scale it making sure that it overlaps the entire object and that it extends above and below so the object is encased inside now we click on this modifier and make some simple changes thickening the top surface but more importantly setting the top and bottom infill pattern to concentric now once we slice something interesting happens the parts of the disk where the triangles didn't intersect maintain their usual monotonic infill but any portions where the triangles did intersect have this separate pattern and the way we set this up works for the top and bottom as well printed this one I think looks really cool and I love the fact that the pattern is on the top as well as the bottom pushing the ID further I created another array with two different size circles importing that as a modifier once again resizing it so the original disk was encased and again set the modify to have concentric infill however you can use anything else that you like here it's really fun to play with these modifiers changing the thicknesses and patterns for the two different parts I don't think the printed result looks as good as the last one but it's still valid as an example of how to experiment with these patterns normally we don't see this bus in fill but what if we experiment by exposing it to achieve this all we need to do is turn off all of our wall Loops as well as all of our bottom and top Solid layers and now when we slice we should be left with only the infill grits a little bit boring for this so instead I went for gyroid gyroid is an interesting pattern that looks absolutely mesmerizing as it's built but you might notice that we have all of these anchor sections on the outside that are ruining the aesthetic to get rid of those we come down to sparse infield anchor length set it to zero and maximum length for the infield anchor can be set to zero as well now when we slice we're left with pure infill pattern and of course I just had to try printing this the end result is pretty interesting to look at we can see that it is in fact Hollow kind of like a sponge and the outer surface isn't that clean because there's no walls to Anchor everything it's also surprisingly strong which prompted me to repeat by scaling everything up and printing in TPU the outer surface is messy but there is one amazing property and that's that this whole thing acts like a spring changing the density will allow you to tune how deformable this is as will changing the infill pattern this version being cubic the appearance is a lot more clean despite the fact I forgot to turn off the outside anchors and it's a lot more rigid when you're trying to compress it but it still has excellent memory always returning back to its original form wanting to push this concept further I drew a simple sketch then a helix and use it to sweep this spiral path to export as an STL modifier once more let's return to our low poly Fox and once again right click add a modifier and load that spiral STL exactly where you place it and rotate it to interact with the model is Paramount and it's worth some experimentation and once you're happy with it we can click on it and modify the properties as you can see for this spiral I've turned off all the external walls and set a fairly dense dry hexagon sparse infill pattern with no anchors if we slice we're already most of the way there but we have some unwanted internal solid infill like we discovered earlier to remove this we need to change the minimum sparse infill threshold to a really small number and that should have the effect of cleaning everything up anywhere where our spiral modifier touch the model we have no exterior walls and we can see the infill but for everywhere else it's printed just like a normal object just a reminder that you're going to need quite a grippy bed so the sparse infill patterns don't become dislodged apart from that this prints just like any other print the final result I would describe as unique some people might call it artistic some people might think it's an Abomination but the point is it's just another way that we can employ infill to change the appearance and structure of our model hopefully there's something here for novices and Veterans alike let me know your favorite in the comments section or add to the knowledge pool with your best tip I would suggest having a browse through the docs for your slicer of choice there's probably some great features you might not know about oh and if you want to replicate these patterns at home I've uploaded the files to printables that's all from me thank you so much for watching and until next time happy mastering your 3D printed infill g'day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time foreign

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 199,131

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printed, 3d printer, 3d print, infill, slicer, orcaslicer, prusaslicer, superslicer, cura, setting, tutorial, parameters, save filament, save time, duration, strength, speed, efficient, efficiency, pattern, peo, bambu, x1c, ratrig, tricks, hacks, exposed, modifier, surface

Id: 3hi2_9-YCbM

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023